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THR 



FREEDOM OF CHRIST 



&nif ©tJj*r gectttve* 






BY 

FRANCIS E.^MARS 

Pastor of the Broad Street Presbyterian Church 
COLUMBUS, OHIO . 



BOSTON 

D. LOTHROP COMPANY 

Washington St. opp. Bromfield. 







Copyright, 1891, 

by 

D. Lothrop Company. 






To the 

Young Peoples Society of Christian Endeavor, 

East and West, 

and 

Young Fellow Students of the Word, 

I Affectionately 

Dedicate this volume. 



CONTENTS 



pags 



I. The Freedom of Christ . . 9 

II. Physician and Citizen . . 31 

. III. The Fountain of Life . . 61 

IV. Courtesy .... 81 

V. The Rod in the Hand . . 101 

VI. The Young Man's Glory . in 

VII. The Great Problem . . . 135 

VIII. The Everlasting . . . 153 

IX. Christian Unity . . . -17* 

X. The Origin of Life . . 193 

XI. The Victory of Faith . .211 

XII. Seeking Great Things . . 231 

XIII. The Law of Love . . . 245 

XIV. The Light of the World . 257 
XV. Enthusiasm for Humanity . . 275 

XVI. The Kingdom of God . . 291 

XVII. Leadership 307 



HYMN. 

Written for the International Convention of the Young People's Society 
Christian Endeavor, 1891. 

0, Saviour divine ! Thou light of the soul ! 
All glory be thine, Thy name we extol : 
The great congregation their praises now bring, 
In full consecration to Thee, 0, our King. 

With ardor of youth, arise in His might, 
And strong in the truth, sin's citadel smite ; 
In Christian Endeavor come, follow His cross, 
Our mighty Defender will keep us from loss. 

0, tell of His love ! His blood's crimson tide, 

Whose throne there above, stands pledged to our side; 

And in loyalty true, our promises give, 

His commandments to do, as long as we live. 

When life's day is done, and death draweth nigh, 
Before His bright sun, each shadow will fly; 
If He comes at daybreak, or in the dark night, 
Let Him find us awake, as children of light. 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 



" There is a twilight dawning on the world, 
The Herald of a full and perfect Day, 
When Liberty's wide' flag shall be unfurled.' 

For freedom did Christ set us free. — Gal. v: i. 



I. 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 

The master passion of our age is liberty. This 
word serves the noblest and the basest of uses. 
Now it is the watchword of morality and religion;, 
now the cry of license, corruption and greed. At 
one time it is inscribed on the banners of the 
nation emerging from feudalism into the broadest 
civilization, where unity and independence up- 
hold the pillars of state ; again it is the cry of 
consummate selfishness, . clamoring under the 
white wing of freedom for absolute tyranny and 
greed. 

Now it swells with the noblest spirit of conse- 
cration, treading in the pathway the Cross has 
shod with lustre for the feet of the generations. 
But hear it again ! What muttered threat shaking 



12 THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 

loose reigns on the wild steeds of anarchy does it 

breathe ? 

A great American says of it, " Its spirit is de- 
structive and aimless ; it is not loving. It has no 
ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out 
of hatred and selfishness." It is that spirit which 
here in America ignores faith and experience, 
saying, " We are a law unto ourselves. Let faith 
be demolished and the old foundations be over- 
thrown." 

But it is the devout thinker and scholar, gath- 
ering the experience of the past into a golden 
torch of wisdom, who illumines the present with 
light and the future with hope. For the highest 
individual freedom is not found in the liberty to 
do as one pleases, but in the liberty of the text : 
The Freedom for which Christ set us free. So I 
want to speak to you of that which lies at the 
foundation of all real social, and political progress, 
and moral and religious freedom. 

What is the freedom of our text ? Comprehen- 
sively, it is the liberty of faith, the liberty of love, 
of truth, of obedience. The grand need of our 
time is this — a positive faith in the great princi- 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. IJ, 

pies of the gospel, and the uplifting of these prin- 
ciples over every roadway of human activity. 

Bondage to legal form and ceremony had laid 
its icy grasp on the Jew's religious life. Frozen 
unto death were his spiritual aspirations, quench- 
ed under petty routine and purile performance. 
The spirit w r as stupefied with the fumes of mint, 
anise, and cummin. Once they had possessed 
reality, but now soul and meaning had fled from 
the dry and dusty symbol, that evidenced no gi- 
gantic struggles, or divine yearnings. They lack- 
ed positiveness in accepting the teachings of their 
own Scriptures and spiritual earnestness in ex- 
pressing their truths. 

" They were held in bondage, " Paul asserts, 
" under the rudiments of the world till Christ 
came." Then faith was revealed. Emancipation 
came by faith in the truth and love of God. " For 
we through the Spirit wait for the hope of right- 
eousness by faith." Christ was that truth and love 
made manifest. So w r e may sing : 

u Jesus, God's love, was crucified." 

Faith in the incarnation, setting forth the ful- 
ness of God's relation to and affection for the race, 



14 THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 

lifted men from servants to sons, and from bond- 
age to liberty. " The truth," the Master said, 
" shall make you free." " And God sent forth the 
spirit of His son into our hearts," declares Paul, 
" crying Abba Father; " and as many as received 
him, to them gave he power to become the sons of 
God. For freedom did Christ set us free. 

Notice then, that this freedom of faith has been 
a vital and life giving force in human progress. 
Freedom of thought, science and education, the 
betterment of social and political methods and re- 
sults have followed in the train of that moral and 
spiritual liberty Christ uplifted for the vision of 
faith. If we read history aright we will see that 
it was really a religious faith that led forth the 
august procession of the ancient civilizations. 
And faith in the gospel has quickened all the great 
movements of modern progress. The belief of the 
earlier ages of Christianity was characterized by 
the utmost simplicity. It revolved around and cen- 
tered in the Redeemer. The soul found its freedom 
through implicit obedience and absorption in 
him. We have been treated in our age to " Patent 
Christ Centric Theologies." The lives of the 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 1 5 

earlier Christians were all Christ centric, their 
theology sprang from Him as its central luminary. 
It permeated the Pauls and Augustines and filter- 
ed downward into the masses of men. 

Christ and religion were not divorced in intel- 
lectual conception. " For me to live is Christ," 
swept up to Heaven as the cry of many hearts. 
Over against the embodiment of truth in the 
" Supreme Event of History," was the voice of 
duty. To see the one, and obey the other was 
the, resistless impulse of the devout soul. 

The Church that wrote its hymns of praise, and 
decked the tombs of its dead, in the labyrinthian 
corridors of the catacombs, was steadfast and un- 
movable in its obedience to its head and led the 
way into the liberty of truth. The same implicit 
obedience and positiveness of belief lent sublimity 
to those mighty movements that such as the cru- 
sades, the reformation of the 16th century in 
England and Germany, and the rise of Methodism 
in Great Britain. It was obedience to the dictates 
of the gospel that has enriched with countless 
benefactions the common life. If any advantage 
has been gained by reformation or revolution it is 



l6 THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 

in this direction — the freedom of truth. "Lib- 
erty," says a great American thinker, " is obedi- 
ence." Liberty of thought is the closest conform- 
ity of thought to truth ; and civil' liberty does not 
lie in anarchy but in perfect obedience to law. 

Now this is just the freedom to which Christ 
directs. An Aggassiz finds success by obeying 
the laws of nature. He studies her, by submit- 
ting to her own behests. Only in one way will 
she yield up her secrets. Over the gateway of 
the laboratory which holds her deeper life she 
writes: "Let none enter here who will not obey." 
Obedience wins the highest physical perfection. 
Disobedience to the law of being has wrought all 
the havoc that degrades man's moral world. 

By obedience alone can the lost ground be re- 
covered. 

Leadership comes not simply from greatness of 
intellect, but from greatness of soul. The men 
who have been the world's greatest leaders have 
been men of giant faith. They have believed in 
the truth and lost themselves in it. They have 
wrought marvels through obedience to the law of 
Christ. They have lost their life in Him to find it 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 17 

again in their completed work. " The power of 
the Masters/' says Ruskin, " is their self-annihila- 
tion/' and he says also, that the power of painter 
or poet in describing rightly the ideal, depends on 
it not being an ideal but real to him. Such was 
the power of the great masters of religious refor- 
mation and spiritual thought. Faith led to self- 
annihilation. Christ was a reality not a theory. 

Take away from our civilization the freedom of 
faith and the liberty of Christ, and what have we 
left ? The best and the holiest, in the magnifi- 
cent structure of our Christian age, have been won 
by those who have fought or labored in the inspir- 
ation of faith. 

Who are they? Look at their mighty ranks. 
Behold the goodly fellowship and august com- 
panionship into which we are now come ! They 
stand with transfigured eye around the form of 
the lowly Nazarene, acknowledging His Suprem- 
acy, and adoringly lay their gifts at His feet. 
There is Paul, "The life that I now live in the 
flesh," he exclaims in a flow of exulting abandon, 
"I live through faith in the Son of God." There 
is Polycarp, who gladly led the way into martyr- 



l8 THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 

dom for Jesus' sake. There is Augustine who 
saw all souls blest in the love of Jesus. There is 
Chrysostom, learning eloquence from His lips and 
indefatigable endurance from His life. There is 
Saint Bernard, all aflame with a passion for holi- 
ness. There is Luther, learning boldness of 
speech from His lips. There is Calvin, kindling 
the fires of civil liberty, because He came to set 
men free. There is Howard, carrying the torch 
of hope into the prison-house, in imitation of 
Him. And there too stand fast in the faith the 
innumerable host of the known and the unknown, 
who on boundless plain or in lonely valley have 
told the story of the Cross in our own age. As 
well attempt to pluck Orion and Arcturus from 
their courses as to ignore the benefactions that 
have come to our times from those who through 
faith have stood fast in the liberty of Christ. 

All the more clearly appears our argument from 
the material blight that has come with the collapse 
of faith. It is the age of pre-eminent faith that 
has stretched out its hands in benediction to the 
future. "What greater calamity can befall a 
nation," wrote the Sage of Concord, "than loss of 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 19 

worship. Then all things go to decay." When 
Rome was young it was faith in purity and re- 
ligion that helped her smite her way into empire. 
Gibbon meditating on the steps of the Roman 
Capitol might have found the most potent reason 
for the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 
the fact that she had lost all faith. She was with- 
out God and without hope in the world. The life 
blood of Rome oozed from the gaping wounds of 
her dying gladiators. 

" Better, a thousand-fold better," you say, re- 
membering the abominations that the pages of 
Horace, Tacitus and Juvenal reveal, " the furious 
scourge of Goth and Hun and barbarian iconoclasts 
than these seething exhalations from the bottom- 
less pit." "This was the product of a material 
civilization," says a great English historian, and 
his words should come with momentous weight to 
us in Ohio, in the very heart of this republic, so 
vast in its material aggrandisement. "This was 
the product of a material civilization with no fear 
of God in the middle of it ; the final outcome of 
wealth, art and culture raised aloft for all ages to 
look upon." 



20 THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 

Loss of faith in religion means loss of manhood, 
loss of liberty, loss of civilization. 

"What," we may ask, "does our age say to this 
faith ?" Are her liberties and her hopes founded 
upon it? Remembering the faith of a past age, 
and calling to mind the days of martyrdom and 
Christian chivalry, our age seems to many a 
dull prosaic time, given to mean economies 
and gross materialism, and utterly lacking in 
faith. It is certainly a strange time. The like 
the world never saw. In the throes that shake 
the nations paradoxes abound. The end of all 
seems near. Look at the facts in political, social, 
scientific and religious development. They are 
bewildering enough to wise thinkers. From the 
same series of facts good men draw the most op- 
posite conclusions. To some all is good ; to others 
all is bad. The mists and damps of Agnosticism 
breathe through literature and rest upon society. 

It is true that in certain quarters the cry 
goes up : " Give us the dainty comforts science 
affords ; let nature be our religion ; give us the 
abundant harvest, and improved appliances to 
garner it ; delight us with art ; soothe us with 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 21 

music ; let the cunning inventor yoke for us the 
steam and the lightning to the winged car, and 
hring the products and news of all climes to out- 
doors, and we will gladly forego the faith that 
Paul preached, and let Christ enjoy His own lib- 
erty. We will take our ease and be merry." 

Yet another characteristic that marks our times 
is a spirit of restless inquiry in science and re- 
ligion. Men have been busy studying the Reve- 
lation of nature. Here they find law following 
unerring law ; everything fitted into its place, and 
knowing it. Is it surprising that, occupied with 
the wonders of the created, they have been too ab- 
sorbed to remember the Creator ? Second causes 
have blinded the eyes and stultified the mind to 
the first great cause. The processes by which the 
Hand divine works, have veiled, sometimes, the 
omnipotent Hand itself. And this same Spirit has 
invaded religion. In trying to bring down the 
great facts of religion to the common life and 
daily needs of men, God has been lost in dealing 
with His precepts. The simple faith of the past 
is gone. God is shoved aside. Philosophies are 
recast; creeds restated; theologies readjusted. 



22 THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 

Many of the spiritual descendants of Paul and 
Luther in their zeal for liberty of thought almost 
forget the source of all Christian liberty — obedient 
faith in the personal Christ. 

But looking at discouragements will not increase 
hope. The more we strain our vision at the mists 
of doubt the darker they grow. A traveler gliding 
down towards the mouth of the noble Hudson, 
when fog rests on the east bank of the river, seeks 
to pierce the fog with the finest field glass at his 
command. But, alas ! he is not better, but worse off. 
There is more fog than ever. He cannot see as 
well as with the naked eye. For the glass mag- 
nifies the intervening fog. But if he would see 
the glories of nature let him turn where the west 
offers no obstruction to his vision. 

Let us look at the brighter picture. It is not 
true to say that ours is a dead or formal age, 
though in some quarters the decay of faith is 
marked by formalism. But the spirit of heroism 
and unselfish devotion to great ends, that has 
characterized noble men of our times, show that 
we vie w4th the ages of chivalry or the spirit of 
the martyrs. Where will you find more romance 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 23 

than in the lives of some of our devotees of 
science ? 

Do you look for the spirit of the martyrs ? Find 
it in the lives willingly sacrificed under the cross 
of Jesus for the salvation of men. Have not 
China, Mexico, Madagascar and the islands of the 
sea been red with the blood of the faithful in this 
century ? Did Polycarp or Latimer do more ? 

Witness David Livingstone dying alone in the 
heart of Africa on bended knees! Behold the 
spirit of adventure and discovery for great ends 
displayed by a Stanley! See the Dark Continent 
open for civilization and evangelization. When 
did the banner of the Cross carried by zealous 
missionaries look over more mountain-peaks or 
gleam down more valleys than to-day? In a past 
generation Lamartine, the gifted French traveler, 
standing in the great Christian city of London, was 
amazed "at its vast wealth and its magnificent 
and multitudinous philanthropic institutions " the 
offspring of religion. Visit the great cities of 
America that were nameless then. Lo ! How 
the Christian faith looks down upon you, triumph- 
ant from numerous and largely endowed charities ! 



24 THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 

Surely this is not a dead or prosaic age. The 
church is standing steadfast. She is re-echoing 
Paul to-day, " for freedom did Christ set us free." 
One of our poets has caught the spirit of the 
Church when he writes : 

" Unmeasured and unlimited. 
With noiseless slide of stone to stone, 
The mystic Church of God has grown ; 
Invisible and silent stands 
The temple never built with hands." 

And from this invisible temple comes the call 
to the visible Church to faith, obedience and lib- 
erty. 

We recognize truly that we live in a wonderful 
transition time. All things are reaching out to a 
better, when men shall be wiser, and Faith lift her 
wing from a loftier vantage ground. But it will 
not satisfy all earnest men to say there is a 
better time coining. VXhe faith that seeks the lib- 
erty of Christ is restless for full activity. It asks, 
with eye bent on the loving Redeemer, What is 
the great need of our times? Can religion do 
more than it does ? We may need the regenera- 
tion of philosophy, a more active statement ot 
creed, and the reformation of scientific theology 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 25 

worked out in the crucibles of our great thinkers. 
But we do not need these things so much as we 
need better Christians, 

We cannot have a better Redeemer. If telling 
the world what we ought to believe would do it, 
the Church would be an incandescent heat of sub- 
jective activity. 

We need to bring religion down from ballooning 
among the misty deeps of metaphysical specula- 
tion, to those things which lie closest to the com- 
mon life. Let our faith cling tenaciously and 
obediently to the truths, duties and affections 
Christ has made ever present and permanent. Re- 
membering that God is permanent, truth is per- 
manent and duty is permanent, let us bind the 
Bible to our brows and go forward into that uni- 
versal brotherhood and largeness of life it is the 
glory of the Gospel to reveal. 

To most thinking men, it will not be enough 
to say comprehensively, " Do these things." If 
the Church, strong in faith, was standing stead- 
fast in the liberty of the Gospel, think you so 
many Christians would be too absorbed in 
pleasure or money-making, to make the Church 



2,6 THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 

a power in correcting the glaring evils of our 
time? 

But it does not satisfy good men to simply say, 
There is a good time coming, and one day Christ 
will reign supreme, and sin be vanquished. The 
faith that fixes its eye on the Redeemer is restless 
for large activity. 

The Christian leadership that will really lead, 
must have its enthusiasm for humanity kindled 
before the cross at the feet of Jesus. Taught by 
the open Book it has a clear conception of human- 
ity as divine and man as the child of God. It be- 
holds, that, the ultimate fact of man's existence is 
God in him the hope of glory, and the ultimate 
truth, from which all other truths take form and 
color, is, that man is intrinsically pure, and noble 
and strong. All else is blurr, blot and mistake 
and ruin. Christ in man means freedom from sin 
and wrong, and obedience to righteousness; and 
righteousness is peace and quietness and assur- 
ance forever. 

We need the regeneration of philosophy, bring- 
ing it to the feet of Christ, and learning of Him 
whose life is the centre of all existence, the cause 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 2/ 

and immanent force of all natural and spiritual 
law ; we need a more exact, simple and Scriptural 
statement of doctrine, where the voice of Christ 
shall be paramount, before whose changeless 
thought, ail human expression is but as a 
passing cloud over the changeless blue of a sum- 
mer sky, that catches its sole radiance from the 
shining sun. 

The dead hand of the ages cannot bind the be- 
lief of to-day, or the gaunt skeleton of a hundred 
years ago flaunt an adopting act with awful 
menace into the face of the living Church 
and say, " Thou shalt not move." We need the 
reformation of scientific theology worked out in 
the crucibles of our greatest thinkers. But we do 
not need these things so much as we need better 
1 Christians in the Church to-day. So much as the 
Church needs to live up to the essential doctrines 
she believes with all her might, and, 

" So let our lips and lives express, 
The holy doctrines we profess." 

So much as we need to be led forth into the per- 
fect obedience to Christ. The Church needs near- 
ness to the Redeemer. But if this gospel is fol- 



28 THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 

lowed into the freedom of Christ, it will mean the 
transformation of society, business, political econ- 
omy, and the opinions and customs now preva- 
lent in the world ; the absolute dominion of the 
heart and mind of Christ over humanity ; the 
reign of love, the sway of universal brotherhood. 
Cannon Farrar, speaking of the responsibilities 
of America, said they were a To combine the 
past and the present ; the old and the new ; to 
lead the nations of the world in the path of 
temperance, as we have led you in the path of 
emancipation ; to be the torch-bearers of our lag- 
ging moral consciences, and by judicious laws to 
.help us and all the world to get rid of that evil, in- 
temperance, the miseries from which Gladstone 
said are greater than war, famine and pestilence 
combined ; to establish a pure and righteous press ; 
to neutralize the evil done by the recitation of every 
petty detail of vice and crime all over the world ; 
to heal the insatiable greed for intrusive personali- 
ties ; to guard the ideal of true freedom, and to see 
that this people does not confound liberty with 
license ; and to keep a true equilibrium between 
freedom and advance.'' 



THE FREEDOM OF CHRIST. 29 

The redemption of Christ is to save the men 
now as well as to redeem that blood-washed 
throng, that fill with reflected splendor the heaven 
of God. The spirit of Jesus Christ, who gave 
himself to death for a lost world is to be the spirit 
of His church and His people. 

Absorbed in His mind and heart, with His blood- 
red hand resting upon us, let us join that mighty 
company who in the liberty of faith, love, truth 
and obedience, beneath the uplifted Cross, and 
with the open Bible in extended palms, have 
pressed on in " The freedom for which Christ has 
set us free," rich in enthusiasm and hope for the 
lofty possibilities of the race. 

The years come slow, the tares grow strong, 

Faith falters and is dumb ; 
But God's time is the harvest time, 

And that will surely come. 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 



"Let all the ends, thou aim'st at, be thy country's, 
Thy God's, and truth's," 

The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to min- 
ister, and to give his life a ransom for many. 

Mark x:45« 

Physicians of all men are most happy. 

QlJARLES. 






II. 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

Every professional man is more or less aware 
of the popular distrust in which the courage, 
sagacity and unselfishness of his class are held. 
" The quack and the demagogue, or at least the 
self-made man, are good enough for us," shouts 
the crowd. " Franklin, Greeley, Lincoln, cham- 
pion our cause "—as though these famous men 
did not seek to repair the gaps of a defective edu- 
cation by the most patient study and research. 
Dr. Cure-all-Quick, with his soft soap and his nos- 
trums at five dollars per bottle, to be dispatched 
in three days — no less than ten bottles warranted 
to cure — is preferred before the patient student 
treading in the patlrway of experience. 

The scholar appealing to his books is laughed 
to scorn ; yet the scholar, gathering the experience 



34 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

of the past in a golden sheaf of wisdom, lights the 
torch of progress, and is the conserving force of 
liberty. The pedestal upon which stands the real 
Liberty, of which Bartholdi's Liberty is only the 
symbol, was built through long centuries of patient 
study. There has been put into it by thinkers, 
learners, and lovers of their kind, those principles 
of law, justice, exchange and brotherhood, gleaned 
in historic mines and on the fields of truth, which 
permeate the economy of the civilized world. On 
this stands the liberty we enjoy. Such a statue 
as that erected on Bedloe's Island would have 
been a caricature in the Middle Ages. But, like 
the yeast in the dough, liberty has been at w r ork, 
and the world is a much better place to live in 
than it ever was. 

Yet the demagogue shouts, "Away with your 
experience ; we live in a phenomenal age ; what 
has America to do with experience? " 

Voltaire, insulted by a London mob, turned on 
the steps of his hotel and complimented them on 
their glorious constitution and love of liberty. 
The stupid crowd did not see the covert sarcasm. 
Commenting on this incident, "When I 'hear," 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 35 

says George William Curtis, " that America may 
scorn experience because she is a law unto her- 
self, I remember the remark made a few years ago 
by a foreign observer in our city of Washington, 
1 1 did not fully comprehend your greatness until 
I saw your Congress. Then I felt that if you 
could stand that you could stand anything, and I 
understood the saying, that God takes care of 
children, drunken men, and the United States.' " 
Our professional and educated classes are de- 
nounced as cowards and mammon-worshippers. 
According to Mr. Tennyson, we are the heirs of 
all ages. So humanity falls as often among 
thieves as among the good Samaritans. Lucy 
Parsons and Gladstone are the opposite poles of 
civilization. There are great evils to be cured and 
gigantic wrongs to be righted ; but the "We must 
live" doctrine is too often omnipotent. There is 
need of caution. Whatever else a man is, in this 
land (unless he be a reprobate), Christian, pagan, 
lawyer, doctor, minister, artisan, haberdasher, he 
must be a citizen. You cannot separate the man 
and the citizen. The mighty problems that 
cast their shadow on the future await solution. 



36 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

They are in the realm of civil polity, law, ethics,, 
and economics. As the Church too often leaves 
the rescuing of the seething masses in our great 
cities to ill-formed ranters and Salvation Army 
tactics, so the educated, scientific and professional 
leave the temperance problem in the hands of 
fanatics. To attack the wholesale nicotine poison- 
ing of the race is not popular. It might lose a 
fee. 

Look at the problems that face us : the social 
question, the just relations of capital and labor,, 
the distribution of land, restraining the towering 
power of corporate wealth with its opportunities 
of gigantic corruption. Already the morning gun 
has sounded on all these great issues. The Lex- 
ington and Concord have been fought with the 
rattling musketry of the minute men, and the 
broad day conflict of Bunker Hill, which shall be 
but the beginning of the end of a larger liberty 
and prosperity, is resounding through the land, and 
destined to break the shackles forged by the pow- 
er of the tyrant more vindictive than George III. 

The demand of the country is for high wisdom 
and ripe culture — not simply aesthetic taste. 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN, 37 

The physician, above all men, should seek a 
symmetrical life, physically, intellectually and 
morally. He should cultivate a habit of mind 
with steadfast reference to equity founded in 
nature, purity and public advantage. A man 
must be greater than his profession or his talents. 
" The purest literary talent," says Emerson, "ap- 
pears at one time great, at another time small, 
but character is of a Stella and undiminishable 
greatness." This is what made Lord Chatham, as 
he stood at the head of the English nation, organ- 
izing her victories on sea and land, and told their 
story to the British parliament, glow with the 
form of Britain's self; the roar of British guns 
and the shout of British victory reverberated in 
his eloquence, and men felt that there was some- 
thing grander about the man than anything he 
said. It was character. 

You will need all the powers of mind and soul 
to adorn the profession of medicine. It is through 
the sterling qualities of an exalted manhood that 
confidence is won. Let the community respe6l — 
because it cannot help it — the man — they will 
have confidence in the profession. 



38 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

Manhood is enshrined in a setting of pure gold, 
humility and patriotism — it incarnates liberty, 
truth, time, space, love, thought, faith and action. 
The notion that the professional life is broad and 
high, vibrating to the real needs of men, does not 
mean that the physician is a jack-at-all-trades and 
proficient in none. " He is a learned man," says 
old Parson Emmons, of New England, " who un- 
derstands one subject, and a very learned man 
who understands two." 

The life at which I hint but concentrates itself 
in the professional career, and makes it luminous 
by the solarity of its innate fires. 

This is an age of specialists. "It takes fourteen 
years," says Mitscherlich, "to establish a new fact 
in chemistry." "The highest genius," Dr. 
Holmes cautions his students, "cannot afford to 
forget the ancient precept, Divide et impera" 

The man who would reach the highest must 
forego often the present dollar. The stamp of 
limitation on our individuality can never be eras- 
ed. Providence and law handle us roughly. 
Nature is no sentimentalist. She never appears 
with the smirk and bow of the dancing master be- 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 39 

fore our reverences, but rudely shoves us into the 
world, and then pushes us without ceremony into 
our places when we get here. Although the flash 
of the imagination and the delicate wit of that 
scholar may be received with becoming reserve 
who said, u With high magnifiers Dr. Carpenter 
might come to distinguish in the embryo, at the 
fourth day, this is a Whig, that a Free Soiler." 

Yet I can conjure up no limitations that can by 
any possibility make it good manners or good 
morals for a man to be any thing less than a man 
and a citizen in this age and republic. 

Medicine, on its natural history side, is called a 
science, on its healing side, an art. We study 
pathology but to understand the meaning of ther- 
apeutics. It is to be pursued w r ith that devotion 
and enthusiasm that science and art demand in 
their successful votaries. There is no better w T ay 
to secure this needed enthusiasm than to keep con- 
stantly in mind the great qualities and achieve- 
ments of the forerunners in the profession. 

Remember those who have become great in the 
past or in the present, as practitioners, devotees 
of science, or in the cultivation of the humanities. 



40 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

Says a famous countryman : " I can not hear of 
personal vigor of any kind, great power of per- 
formance, without fresh resolution. " The study 
of history and biography stimulates us to the pos- 
session of great traits ourselves, and conduces to 
this end. They promote love, enthusiasm, and 
the genius of hard work, which, more than all 
else, is the w r atchword and golden key that opens 
the path of success. 

Longfellow never sang a truer note, if he did a 
sweeter, than when he wrote : 

"The heights by great men reached and kept, 

Were not attained by sudden flight, 
But they, while their companions slept, 

Were toiling upward in the night." 

For it is true in our own time that: " The 
average Britons reverence pedigree ; the average 
Americans, performance ; the highest Britons, an- 
cestry ; the highest Americans, achievement." 

The art of medicine must, then, be pursued with 
a lofty motive. Its obje6t is not simply to live and 
make money. That pretended physician will not 
secure lasting success who simply cultivates the 
art for what he can make out of it. Charlatan, or 
quack, like Paracelsus, he would bargain with a 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 41 

sick man, with the dread of death upon him, for a 
good round sum, as the price of condescending to 
take the case. There are already too many such 
men in all walks in life, whose summum bonum of 
existence and philosophy is -" We must live." 

The clergyman of a certain village observed a 
man unknown to him, as he went his rounds. 

" Who are you, sir?" was his pertinent query. 

" I am the village rat catcher," was the reply. 
"And, pray, who are you, sir?" 

" I am the village clergyman." 

" Humph," replied his majesty, the rat catcher, 
" 'spose every feller must git a livin- some how." 

When those that affect the welfare of humanity 
are actuated by no higher purpose, the priest and 
the Levite play into the hands of Jericho's ban- 
dits, and their alleged reason for existence is good 
cause to clap on the extinguishers. 

The physician should fall in love with his 
art, and live for it, however distressing some of 
the details of its practice may be. Let John 
Hunter's patience and enthusiasm inspire you, 
gentlemen. 

The great question to settle first of all is, " Is 



42 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

the healing art worth cultivating by a man?" Is 
it worth while for myself and for humanity ? 

Your famous Dr. Dana has written a book to, 
in part, answer the query, " Is human life worth 
saving ? " Is it worth while for a Jenner or a 
Harvey to spend a laborious lifetime to try and for- 
tify men against the germs of a few diseases, when 
the majority of men are doing pretty much their 
best to invite disease and degenerate the race ? 

" Jenner indulged in the delightful imagina- 
tion," says Russell in his " Heroes of Medicine.," 
"that vaccination would eradicate small pox." 
A little farther on he writes : " Jenner spoke the 
truth when he said that vaccination could eradi- 
cate small pox." But alas, for the perversity and 
stupidity of human nature ! 

How vast the achievements of medicine in pro- 
longing and ameliorating the sufferings of human 
life ! The average duration of life in England 
in the sixteenth century was only eighteen years, 
now it is forty-one. And this extension of longev- 
ity may be traced diredlly to the forefending of 
disease by the wisdom, laws, precepts and vigil- 
ance of the healing art. 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 43. 

In 1729 three out of every four children died 
before the age of five years. Now, outside of the 
densely packed cities, where the conditions 
for infant life are most unfavorable, only thirty 
per cent, of all deaths occur under the age of five. 
And in the realm of surgical science we are told 
that similar encouraging results have been reach- 
ed. But there is a shadow to the pidlure. The 
dark side is in the fact that, while medicinal, sur- 
gical and sanitary measures are increasing life, and 
reducing the fatality of acute diseases, there is, 
notwithstanding this life-saving, and really be- 
cause of it, " a steady increase in the proportion- 
ate number of the defective, the dependent, the 
chronic invalid, and degenerate classes. " 

Nervous diseases, those of heart and lung, says 
our statistician, are increasing. In most countries 
the insane, idiotic, deaf mutes, inebriates and the 
criminals, are in much greater proportion to the 
population than they were forty or fifty years ago. 
The race is being filled with taint, defedt, with 
moral and physical virus. Statistics of suicides 
and crimes through intemperance are familiar to 
us all. In view of all these facts what can be said 



44 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

in answer to the question, " Is life worth living ? " 
It is a question. Viewed from the material and 
humanitarian standpoint, is it worth while for the 
recipients of these philanthropic efforts ; does it 
pay for those who have to bear the burdens ? 

The purveyors of modern science, thought and 
philosophy in our periodical literature, and in 
many books, use the term " ethical uncertainty" 
to express the peculiar flavor that the age has 
taken to itself. 

Two men were in a hen-house. It was night. 
Even in Ohio their business may be suspected. 
One held the bag, the other secured the fowl. 
Said the first to the bag-holder : 

" Do you think it is right for us to be in here 
taking these chickens ? " 

" Well, Samuel," was the reply, " that's a great 
moral question ; we haven't time to discuss it 
now. Please pass down another pullet." 

We daily read that this is an age of moral dis- 
ruption. The educated classes have lost confi- 
dence in the old foundations, and the masses are 
becoming divorced from morals and moral teach- 
ing. But there is no time to discuss great moral 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 45 

questions while the chickens are being bagged. 

According to these Delphic oracles everything 
that is moral has long since been discredited. 

The president of the municipal council of Paris 
opposed, some time since, the introduction of any 
teaching of morals in the public schools, on the 
ground that there is no system of morals. " What 
is right in one place is wrong in another." In 
short, circumstances and conditions make morals. 

A learned wit has written a life of Robert 
Burns, in which he regards his drunkenness and in- 
continence as the least objectionable of his faults. 

Then the burglar who pleaded the money and 
time invested in his business and his expertness 
as palliatives was, perhaps, on the right track. 
Prince Krapotkine teaches in his book, that all 
crime and moral evil are the direct result of law. 
His panacea is the destruction of law, and then — 
freedom. All of which are specimens of the 
" ethical uncertainty " of the times. And there is 
a recent prophet in the field. He says : 

" A scientific foundation for ethics is rapidly 
becoming a moral necessity, without which a 
moral interregnum impends. The old moral and 



46 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

theological systems are moribund. In place of the 
supernatural, people seek a code of natural ethics.' ) 
What is this natural ethics to which we are di- 
rected ? To illustrate : The amoeba, a curious bit 
of gelatin, breaks in two, and the two pieces turn 
and attempt to devour each other. The parent 
tries to eat the child, and the child to swallow the 
parent. You look on with your natural sympa- 
thies at the sight. There is attack and resistance. 
You feel that there is a sense of right and wrong 
— just the germ of such a sense being developed 
there. How can you help feeling it? The one 
that is devouring feels that it is doing right, the 
one that is being devoured feels that it is wrong- 
ed. Here at once is the sense of right and wrong. 
You feel this same sense up to the highest devel- 
opment of animal life. Life is a struggle, a fight. 
The strongest survives. Science says the fittest. 
But it is always the same thing. The inferior 
must yield up the ghost. The eaten always feels 
he is wronged. The successful one does not see 
it in that way at all. This is natural ethics, ladies 
and gentlemen. Right and wrong are relative, 
not absolute. What is good to one is not at all 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 47 

good to another. " Ethical uncertainty." No 
wonder that some lean to the opinion that hos- 
pitals and philanthropies are all a mistake. It is 
all right for me to break the eighth command- 
ment, bnt if you do it, look out. 

So, the age affords us the delightful ethical un- 
certainties, monism, agnosticism, naturalism, ni- 
hilism, anarchism. The strongest only is fit to 
survive. This is good natural ethics. 

Realism and the sordidly practical spirit of the 
age must inevitably ask : " Is any human life 
worth saving that does not promise to add some- 
thing to the material progress of the race ? M A 
world that considers man's life as " simply a mag- 
nificent efflorescence of protoplasm," which 
measures life by wealth and honors, can hardly 
set a very high value on those who through 
physical or mental loss are incapable of doing 
their part in the way of making themselves useful 
to mankind. 

If a man is only an animal, the sooner the sick, 
aged, insane and infirm are hurried out of the 
world, the better for themselves and for the rest 
of the race. This is the conclusion to which 



48 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

natural ethics and materialism inevitably tend. 

Abstract the idea of immortality from the be- 
liefs of mankind, and absolutely nothing is left on 
which reason can build the structures of philan- 
thropy and charity. 

Social culture and the religion of humanity 
must alike reject in the end, if consistent with 
themselves, all who can not add something to the 
material progress of the race. Not so with the 
life of man viewed from the standpoint of Christ- 
ianity. 

Shelley, who was far from a devout believer, 
could sing : 

" The one remains, the many change and pass ; 
Heaven's light forever shines. Earth's shadows fly ; 
Life, like a dome of many colored glass, 
Stains the white radience of eternity, 
Until death tramples it to fragments." 

And it is then, says its revelation, when the 
scaffolding falls away, that the imperious structure 
of the spirit rises. And " life is worth saving, be- 
cause it represents something divine and im- 
mortal." It ought to be saved and cared for at 
any cost. Christianity would eliminate from the 
race its defective members by eliminating from 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 49 

the world ignorance, sin, wrong and defection. 

Then, as passionate devotees of the sublime art 
of healing, much of your task will be : 

To expel ignorance and her twin sister, super- 
stition. 

To discover and illuminate law. Not to put the 
legend Mos pro lege in place of the supreme 
sceptre. 

To keep constantly before yourselves and others 
the ideal humanity, when science, having swept 
the whole realm of suffering and disease, shall 
have routed every microbe, and given into the 
hand of the healing art the invincible Excalibar y 
that shall defend from all attacks. 

Intelligence on other themes, even great learn- 
ing in certain directions, is no guarantee of invul- 
nerability from the attacks of ignorance and super- 
stition, as the adherents of the craze of the 
Weapon Ointment, the Metallic Tractors, and the 
Tarwater cure, and a host of other manias and 
minor foibles attest. To Bishop Berkley was 
ascribed in dead earnest by many of his admirers,, 
" Every virtue under heaven." It was he who 
wrote a treatise on the Virtues of Tarwater. 



50 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

Dr. Holmes says of him : " He was an illustrious 
man, but he held two very odd opinions, that tar- 
water was everything, and that the whole material 
universe was nothing. " 

It will fall to your lot to help to rid the world of 
the stagnation and nightmare of superstition. 

More and more must men recognize the impress 
of law upon all life, celestial and terrestrial. Em- 
phatically is this so in pathology and its noble 
handmaid therapeutics. 

" All that simple observation and experience 
can determine, •' says Oesterlens, " and nearly all 
that has yet been established in medical science, 
amounts to this : That certain things occur in a 
definite manner and order." That in short law 
governs the process of disease and also the process 
of cure. 

And in the development of pathological science 
my faith is— the time is to come when the whole 
circle of pathology shall be so perfectly surveyed 
by the searching eyes of science that for every cry 
of need the winged angel of Therapeutics will hast- 
en with her specific swift and sure. Cures will 
not then be lame or imperfect. And the witty 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 5 1 

Travers, or one like him, will no longer be able to 
point a moral or adorn a tale in the fashion de- 
scribed to him. Meeting a fellow-stammerer on 
the street, he asked, "Why d-d-don'ty-you g-g-get 
c-c-cured? " " Ca-c-ant d-d-do it," was the reply. 
"G-go to Dr. , he c-c-c-cured me," 

And more than this, the germs of disease shall 
be slain in their nests, and the physician's busi- 
ness shall be to keep his patient well. 

The physician should have high ideas of the 
possible and actual good in humanity. 

Doctor Jackson, a great New England physi- 
cian, wrote of himself : 

" I have striven to see the good points in the 
characters of ail men and women." And the 
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table says of him : " He 
had an earnest desire to promote the welfare of all 
mankind." And just here, in his enthusiastic 
love for humanity, its rights, duties, liberties, pro- 
gress, comes the physician's relation to the com- 
munity and the republic, as a citizen. 

You need not be ashamed, gentlemen, to point 
to the record of the men of your profession. It is 
such men as the Harveys, the Sydenhams, the 



52 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

Jenners, the Warrens, the Howes, men from your 
ranks, who have kept the white plume of 
Navarre flashing in the van of battle, where the 
conflict for human good or political liberty was 
being waged. 

As far back as the thirteenth century, in those 
free Italian municipalities that far outstripped the 
rest of the world in intelligence, wealth, culture 
and power, we find the physicians taking active 
part in the social and political formations and 
transformations of the age. After the battle of 
Tagliocozzo, and Charles of Anjou subjected the 
Sicilians to the sufferings of an intolerable French 
rule, it was a wise and patriotic physician who 
planned the liberation of his country. And Dr. 
Proceda, of the thirteenth, deserves a place beside 
the lofty promoters of Italian unity in the nine- 
teenth century ; the statesman Mazzini, the soldier 
Garibaldi, Verdi, the composer, who swept up the 
shining heights of song, to find fresh inspiration 
for his patriotism. 

But we need not go to other lands or times. 
We, too, have our heroes of medicine, who have 
been equally heroes in the allegiance to their 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 53 

country's welfare. This nation, under God, has 
survived the perils of its morning and the noon- 
tide throes of internecine war, whose seismic 
shocks threatened disintegration. But we are still 
in the process of nation making. The outlook as 
it reaches the horizon is not without its ominous 
clouds. The question confronts us : with the 
multitudes of the dependent, the imbecile, and the 
criminal classes, increasing^ can the tendencies to 
degeneracy and disintegration be thwarted, citi- 
zenship exalted and the republic perpetuated ? 

" Patriotism is allied to philosophy," says Se- 
ward, " and inseparable from benevolence." Just 
as fixed and revealed laws operate in the science 
of medicine, so in nation making God's providence 
and will operate by certain determined and open 
laws. 

As we read Carnegie's book; or " Our Country," 
by Dr. Strong, we seem to traverse the enchanted 
corridors of the Arabian Nights'. But where shall 
we seek the influences for so gigantic and arduous 
a task as ours ? 

" The Promethean fire," writes one of our great 
statesmen, " is ever to be rekindled at the domes- 



54 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

tid fireside and humble school where the American 
citizen is trained.' ' We need men of clear heads 
and sound wisdom to lead in this task. Citizens 
who shall possess the character to lead citizens. 
" Men of character,' \ says the sage of Concord, " are 
the conscience of the society to which they belong." 
Such men tell their brethren what they ought to 
think and do. Here is the secret of citizenship. 
It lies with the patriot, not with the demagogue. 
It lies with a Garfield, not a Ben. Butler ; with a 
Lincoln, not a Jefferson Davis ; a Sumner, not a 
Denis Kearney ; a Prof. Ely, not a Dr. Aveling, 
(who, like some other great apostles, is ready to 
sacrifice himself for fifty cents a head, seven nights 
in the week, on the lecture platform.) 

In great crises it is thinking as others think and 
appealing to the heart and mind of the nation that 
makes the great man. When Abraham Lincoln 
stood at Gettysburg and declared the new birth of 
liberty that had come to this nation, he represent- 
ed the constructive and conservative force of a 
great people, and as he forecast the future of the 
citizen's government, his form dilated with the 
majesty of the Republic and his eloquence reverber- 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 55 

ated to every nook and corner of the land. He 
spoke for the people and to the people. 

11 This is a glorious day/' cried Samuel Adams, 
with a price set upon his neck. "Decus et decorum 
est" gaily shouted the young physician Warren, 
as he rushed to his death at Bunker Hill. 

Such men inspire their followers with their sub- 
lime enthusiasm, and are invincible factors in our 
national life. They counsel patient waiting, and 
freedom from servility to wrong headed majorities. 
You and such as you, gentlemen, who can bring 
law and experience to bear upon the solution of 
the social and political problems of our time, know 
the need of patience and can enforce its teachings 
with the power of authority. 

It was at Lookout Mountain that the officers 
grew impatient because the reserves did not ap- 
pear on the scene of battle, and cried to General 
Thomas, " The day is lost." " Patience, gentle- 
men ; give the boys time," replied the intrepid 
commander. And the brave boys came in time 
and the day was won. 

It is this voice that scourges the demagogue 
and quack and points out their fallacies. u God is 



56 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

with the majority," cries the mob. "Vox popidi, 
vox Dei" foams the stump. But experience 
teaches that a crowd is not wiser than the wisest 
man in it. History recalls the experience of Gali- 
leo, Copernicus, Bacon, Harvey, Jenner, as they 
planted themselves upon the rock of truth and 
moved not at the yells of ignorance and supersti- 
tion. The voice of the people in London pro- 
nounced against street lamps, and declared innoc- 
nlation wicked. The voice of the people cried 
" Crucify Him, crucify Him." " God is on the 
side of the biggest gun, the strongest fort, the big- 
gest crowd," yells the party swindler and the 
charlatan. " No," says the impartial voice of his- 
tory. God was with the one man on the cross, 
not with the multitude ; with the exiled pilgrims, 
not with Laud and the hierarchy of Westminster ; 
with Washington, not with George III.; with the 
Huguenots, not the king that massacred and exil- 
ed them ; with Galileo, not with the prelacy; with 
Jenner and innoculation, not with the London 
mob. 

Still farther, it is the educated and thoughtful 
citizen that shall limit and control the rightful in- 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 57 

fluence of ignorant and false majorities. He it is 
that so moulds public opinion on all questions 
that at the first opportunity it bursts into the more 
than Amphion music that levels the Theban walls 
of ignorance and slavery. It is the men who be- 
lieve that at the heart the nation is right and hu- 
manity is right, and will hear the truth, who win 
the day. So your art and your patriotism alike 
summon you to great achievements, to impress the 
solar radiance of true character upon the age. 

You may be recreant to your trust and incur the 
contempt of the world for you and your class. 
When DeQuincy met Dr. Parr, he described him 
as a lisping scandal monger, whose conversation 
was not fit for washerwomen to indulge in. Sir 
Thomas Brown, while great civil commotions 
were shaking England, sat apart, with no 
glimmer of patriotism, polishing the conceits of 
the Burial Urn, and the long drawn music of the 
Religio de Medici. Erasmus, Brown, Goethe, 
have won for themselves the epithets of scholarly 
and literary pedants, who prefer voluptuous ease 
to practical devotion to humanity. But we need 
to remember what has been repeated again and 



58 PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 

again since Coleridge said to Washington Alston, 
" We are not to judge a work of art by its defects. " 
We are not to judge a class, a profession or a 
nation by its defects. 

Sound minds in sound bodies will make sound 
citizens. What imperils the one must impair the 
other. It is your task to declare unflinchingly the 
law of life and the dicta of experience. Stand, if 
need be, in the minority with God and right. For 
after all God has so made this world that it really 
pays to do right. 

In this republic to which the Englishman 
brings his grit, sense and dominion ; the German 
his profound learning and endless capacity for 
downright hardwork ; the Frenchman his clear 
vision and enthusiasm ; the Yankee his invention, 
w T it and enterprise, it is my faith there is to be 
fused and molded a man — the distinctively Amer- 
ican type — the latest and best creation of God — 
the ideal citizen. And he shall solve in himself 
and through himself the meaning of that mystic 
trio : Liberty, fraternity, equality. 

To us is given the privilege of uplifting into the 
rainbow of our free institutions the best character- 



PHYSICIAN AND CITIZEN. 59 

istics in the old world life, and to transfix them in. 
enduring splendor. 

Gentlemen of Starling ; physicians, citizens,, 
your sublime art and your country have but one 
altar, and one sacrifice, and that altar is dedicated 
to humanity. 



THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 



" Know well, my soul, God's hartd controls 
Whatever thou fear est ; 
Bound Him in calmest music rolls 
Whatever thou hearest" 

The law of the wise is a fountain of life. 

Prov. xiii 114, 



III. 



"THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE/' 

On a massive piece of chalcedony in Ruskin's 
study is inscribed the motto, which has been his 
inspiration in a life of rare literary success and 
moral influence, "To-day." As we gaze at that one 
word the great Master's emphatic utterance rushes 
upon us, " I must work the works of him that sent 
me w T hile it is day ; for the night cometh when no 
man can work." We stand before life's maze. 
What clew will unravel for us its mystery? What 
is its meaning ? The secret of its success or fail- 
ure lies in that word, To-day. 

Prosperity is a flower of the soul itself, not the 
attribute of external relations. " The law T of the 
wise," says Solomon, " is a fountain of life." This 
law, springing from the heart of God is the meas- 



64 THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 

tire of life. Obedience to it is the real making of 
manhood. Collaterals cannot usurp character, 
however much men have sought to make them do 
so. Finding the law of being unravels for us the 
problem of how to live. Christ came to lift nature 
before men and to uphold the imperative majesty 
of law. For when we say nature, as we apply the 
word to men and things alike, we can mean noth- 
ing less than the august law that governs exis- 
tence. As of the physical so of the moral life of 
man " the law of the wise is a fountain of life/' 

Obedience to law is the origin of growth. 
We read of the divine man that he was subject to 
his parents, and learned first of all obedience, and 
found through submission the royal road to mas- 
tery. It is in submitting to the law of being, in 
the physical, intellectual or moral world, that the 
law becomes unto man the fountain of life. 

We live in a strangely contradictory age. On 
the one hand the natural scientists proclaim loudly 
the invincible reign of law ; on the other hand in 
his civil, moral and social relations to his fellows, 
man asserts the supremacy of his own will, with a 
bull dog tenacity, thinking apparently that per- 



THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 65 

sonal liberty and the will to do as I please are 
synonomous. It is the invisible force that is the 
most potent factor in the visible life. 

The art worker must submit to a law, hard to 
obey, but without w T hich is no success. So nature 
has written before the portals whose folds hide 
her most majestic triumphs, " Obey." The 
domain of law in the physical realm is appar- 
ent to a novice. Man is the only creature who 
wantonly violates the law of being, and with en- 
ergy of purpose deviates from the path of right. 
There are secret powders that shape nature. These 
forces are operative in man's life. It is true that 
both the religious and material sphere are under 
the guidance of law. 

Everywhere young men are seeking success in 
the vocations of life. But we are taught to-night 
that success must belong to the man first, before it 
can be transferred to his w T ork. 

What is success ? It has come to pass that our 
great cities are thronged with charioteers, rushing 
onward in din, hurry, passions and tireless enthu- 
siasm, captivated by the prizes that flaunt them- 
selves before the eyes of the racers. Every day 



66 THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 

the trumpet sounds and the lists are opened for 
the contestants. Yet how many that start out 
with every promise of victory, limp shamed face 
into obscurity, or are swallowed up in the dust and 
corruption of the conflict. If a man strive for 
masteries, yet is he not crowned, except he strive 
lawfully. Let us ask ourselves, What is success ? 
Whence comes its laurels ? Success lies first of 
all in the quality of life's purpose. It is the soul's 
aim. Ela sings : 

'* To win and to wear to have and to hold, 
Is the burden of dream and of prayer, 

The hope of the young and the hope of the old, 
The prize of the strong and the fair. 

All dream of some guerdon life's labor to bless ; 

All winning that guerdon, have named it Success." 

Yet how paltry is much of that so named. Suc- 
cess is not in wealth, intellectual achievements, 
or the adulations of fame. Men have put their 
hearts in these things only to find that they were 
in the toils of a master of pitiless cruelty. Suc- 
cess is not written on the back of bank bills. No 
tirade against money, however, will avail. It is 
not money, but the love of it that is an evil. It is 
a means to useful ends. The foolish see in it the 
sum of earthly happiness. 



THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE, 67 

A man who had all these, wealth, rank and lit- 
erary fame in the bitterness of his heart could 
wrrite : 

u My days are in the yellow leaf, 

The fruits and flowers of love are gone. 
The worm, the canker and the grief 
Are mine alone." 

What is success? Submission to the law that is 
a fountain of life. Doing our best each day. En- 
tering the open door of opportunity day by day. 
Success is the use of to-day. It was Garfield who 
said, " I have always followed my convictions at 
whatever cost to myself." 

The elements that make for success in daily 
pursuits are concentration and work. Self-reliance 
springing from reliance on the Divine. Let him 
that ministers at this altar, or that, set up in the 
great cathedral of human industries, wait on his 
ministering. Failure has marked the path of 
many a life squandered in trying to spread over 
too large a surface. Keeping to one aim and 
making all else converge to that pursuit cannot 
fail to give more or less success to him who is 
steadfast and un movable. 

The wise professional man lays all life and lit- 



68 THE FOUNTAIN OF WFE. 

erature under contribution to him, but he does it 
to make the treasures, that he discovers in his 
many excursion into this or that realm of litera- 
ture or science, contribute to the chosen occupa- 
tion of his life. Thus while he knows many 
things, he knows with the fiery ardor of his heart 
and mind, one thing. 

Work is the law of success. Luck does not 
bring golden dower to many in this world, but 
doing one's best each day. Enter the open door 
of opportunity. When a young man this is what 
Dr. Miner told me : " How will you ever do any- 
thing unless you take what the Lord sends, and go 
in the door that opens." 

Francis Campbell was a blind man, Yet he be- 
came a distinguished musician, mathematician 
and philanthropist. Laura Bridgman became one 
of the foremost women of America. Here is 
a hint of capacity and opportunity, We can only 
improve according to the line of capacity. Ex- 
Governor Dingley, of Maine, gives as the requi- 
sites of success ; character, industry, perseverance. 
Take what comes to hand. Despise not to-day, 
waiting for what to-morrow may possibly east up 



THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 69 

to our feet. Make the greatest effort — it leads 
nearer the ultimate goal, if our lives are guided 
by law. 

You want to know what makes the difference 
between men ? The unsuccessful physician asked 
a successful one who had been his equal in col- 
lege, u What is the secret of your success ? I 
promised quite as well in life as you, but 
you have won and I am still at the foot of the lad- 
der." Said the man of success, "Look out of my 
office window and tell me which of the people going 
by you would like to have for patients." " Well, 
I wouldn't like to have that one, or that one." 
"There is a man you would like? there is a 
woman ? " " Yes." " But you see you want only 
what you call nice people for patients. About 
two persons in twenty, as men run, will satisfy 
your fastidiousness. I want the people. I take 
the other eighteen as well." That is the differ- 
ence between the victor and the defeated. 

Many, it is true, have had success in life's call- 
ings out of all proportion to their deserts, but the 
mass of men find achievement in direct ratio to 
their obedience to the law of the wise. It is sue- 



JO THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 

cess, that has an element of power in it, of which 1 
speak. This power comes only from obedience to 
law. Submission to higher self brings mastery. 
The great men of the world are discoverers and 
obey nature. Her law must be followed or no 
lasting success can be attained. Say what you 
will of temptation, environment and the subtile 
influences to evil, no man is drawn aside from the 
law of rectitude except by his own self-determin- 
ing choice. You cannot gain victory over a man 
without capturing his will. 

In this submission to law lies the power of char- 
acter. It is self-reliance springing from a reliance 
on the divine. The liberty of manhood is only 
gained in this way. Following the revelation of 
truth that a man sees in the light of his inner con- 
sciousness is real success. It makes him. It 
is the product of a law that cannot be impeached, 
or its product effaced. It is not something that is 
put on a man, but a something that grows out of 
him. 

Even in that loose use of the word character, 
which makes it a synonym of reputation, it is not 
a garment to be shuffled on and off at pleasure. 



THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 71 

However, evil tongues may calumniate, or one be 
misunderstood or isolated, sooner or later charac- 
ter will be coincident with reputation. 

Let a man then choose his work in cheerful God- 
liness and go forward in it. Self-reliance will 
breed respect for himself and his tasks. A man 
may grow disgusted and quit his tasks because 
somebody sneers. But this is because the man is 
not master, but only a poor apprentice. The self- 
reliant man is the one who has learned by obey- 
ing law, the mastery of nature, place, rank, and 
dominion. He is not ashamed either of himself, 
his aim, or his work. The quack, who has no 
aim or fitness, who tries simply to catch on to a 
boom in the hope that luck will see him out, must 
in the long run come to grief. 

The kingly man is the knowing man, and hence 
the one, who can. The word king means in Ger- 
man and Scotch the one who can, and the one who 
knows how. And he who can, because he has fit- 
ted himself to do by really knowing, is the man of 
success. The genius that makes success is hard 
work. A young New Englander entered a cotton 
mill to learn how to make cotton cloth. He 



72 THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 

spent a year in the carding room, a year in the 
spinning room, a year in the weaving room. A 
long and hard school. He boarded with the 
weaver and asked all the questions he wanted to. 
Then he took the superintendency of a small mill 
at fifteen hundred dollars a year. But he was still 
at school. He was learning and fitting himself for 
higher places, and broader work. He made him- 
self ready and took the patient that came to his 
door. One of the great mills in Fall River had 
been running behind. The directors were in 
trouble. They must have a competent man to take 
charge of their mill and discover and stop the leak- 
ages. A gentleman in Boston knew of a young 
man fitted to take charge. He could save them 
thirty per cent, in running their factories. He had 
not risen on the top wave of a sudden boom, how- 
ever. If they wanted him they must pay him. 
How much? Six thousand dollars a year. "It 
was more than they had paid." " Yes, gentlemen, 
you can get plenty of cheap men, who will run 
the mill as it is running now." They took this 
young man. He saved them forty per cent, in a 
year. Then another mill wanted him at a salary 



THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 73 

of ten thousand dollars, and still another at fifteen 
thousand. It's success to be king. To know, to 
begin at the bottom, and work up worthily. Obe- 
dience to law is power. It is character. Submis- 
sion is kingship at last. 

Obedience will give every man success in the 
line of capacity. But do not be mistaken now. A 
pint of capacity will never give a quart of success. 
The greatest force of character is its moral ele- 
ments. Herein all will agree lies the glory of 
manhood. Not simply to be trusted, but to be 
worthy to be trusted is the soul's purest satisfac- 
tion. This can come only from obedience to the 
moral law of being. 

Law is regnant in the realm in which you have 
been pursuing your studies. Nature never swerves 
from law. In listening to your Dean lecture re- 
cently, I was impressed with the reign of law both 
in the progress and in the cure of that dread 
disease diphtheria. 

Look at the pearly dew drop that trembles in a 
floweret's eye in spring time. Under the guid- 
ance of law, impelled to obedience, it was lifted 
from the ocean, floated perchance in the fleecy 



74 THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 

cloud, or hung invisible in the limpid air, and un- 
der the regime of that same law was precipitated 
to earth to rest a little while on the flower or im- 
part its vigor to plant life. That drop of water, 
the chemist tells me, contains forces which direct- 
ed by unerring law, let loose from present environ- 
ment, would rend mountains or raze cities to the 
dust. Whether this gigantic power is causing the 
desert to bloom and blossom or is hurling down 
mountains, it is always under law. There is no 
escape for it. 

It is only in the world of man that we behold 
perversion, transgression and disobedience to the 
law of being. Explain ye who are skilled in the 
lore of the human heart. Why is that man, with 
the rocks, reefs, breakers and shoals marked out 
so clearly on the sea of life, will persist in steering 
for the very spot over which he has seen so many 
make shipwreck? I am not able to explain the 
existence of evil, and sin, and moral perversion in 
man. I do not think it can be explained. " But, 
if I should doubt its reality, " says one of our 
grandest thinkers, " I should have to disregard 
the deepest instincts of the human soul, and set 



THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 75 

aside the wisest judgments of mankind." For if I 
deny the evil, I must refuse to acknowledge the 
good in the very same terms. For if evil is only 
a slight excrescence, and of no moment, a little 
marring that civilization will eradicate ; if evil is 
only good in the making, then it ceases to be evil, 
right and wrong are the same. We have no real 
moral life. If good and evil are realities, then 
freedom is real. Man is not the prey of resistless 
force. The question of man's obedience is a ques- 
tion of his choice. 

It is in this freedom of choice that character is 
formed. A man has the power to freely dispose of 
himself, and in that is character. He may be 
solicited and enticed, but he is never compelled to 
choose. Hence every man must demand of him- 
self that he obey. The first claim and the last 
one upon him is that he should obey. He is never 
too old to obey. He is not simply to obey a pre- 
cept. The obligation of duty is not the highest 
demand that can be made upon a man. 

Growth in character is through obedience to a 
consciously recognized person. Work the works 
of Him that sent you into life. Precepts of the 



76 THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 

living can tell us how to live, but only life can 
lead unto life. Life only can kindle divine life in 
the soul. 

We need to know God and worship Him. He 
stands manifested unto us by the adorable Son, 
whose personality is the light and life of the 
world. Before this august Creator the soul may 
bow in reverent allegiance. He it is whose being 
is the source of law, the fountain of life, and whose 
exhaustless life is the broadening river of our ex- 
istence. Under the starry temple of the universe, 
in the integrity of manhood we may look up to 
Him, whose life is the source of growth, power, 
character, and through obedience to whose law 
comes all real success. 
Gentlemen of Starling College : — 

I trust that your studies will enable you to real- 
ize the supremacy of law in the universe in which 
we live. You are to go forth to your life work at a 
time when in some quarters in our land there is 
an evident conflict between a liberty founded in 
law and the liberty of the individual will. There 
is a tendency to make that law, which the people 
want, and not that which the people ought to 



THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. JJ 

have. We have seen that obedience to law, found- 
ed in righteousness, is growth, power and char- 
acter. It will be your privilege to uphold law as 
a fountain of life in your professional, civil and 
moral relations to your fellow men. The very 
air throbs with the signs of coming conflict 
between the liberty of the individual will and 
the supremacy of law. In Europe never were 
the armies massed by government and di- 
rected by potentates so mighty as now. The 
tramp of soldiers and the bristle of bayonets 
portends how uneasy at present is " the head that 
wears a crown." 

In our own country we exalt liberty. We utter 
our loudest plaudits over the grand statue of " Lib- 
erty Enlightening the World " that graces the en- 
trance to our principal harbor. But what kind of 
liberty are we seeking? Is it the reign of a pure 
law that shall make the right easy and the wrong 
hard ? or is it simply license for individual pas- 
sion? It is only that liberty which holds out the 
sceptre of righteousness that shall bring prosper- 
ity in her pathway, where mercy and truth shall 
kiss each other, and righteousness and peace be 



78 THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 

rained down from heaven. Then shall our honor 
private and national be : 

" The finest sense 
Of Justice which the human mind can frame, 
Intent each lurking frailty to disclaim, 
And guard the way of life from all offense, 
Suffered or done." 

I am not disposed to take a gloomy view of the 
future. I believe that our people will vindicate 
their trust in the supremacy of righteous law. 
More and more will religion cease to be esoteric 
and regaled to a corner of the week and the hour 
of divine service and become diffusive and practi- 
cal in its relations to all life. Moral and religious 
power, which is but the control of the higher law 
of man's life, will clothe with new attributes all 
the little and every day transactions of humanity. 
Then shall daily living glow with religious fervor. 

The stones of the great city, so perverse and 
corrupted now, shall become the pavement of a 
vast cathedral whose chimes shall be the music of 
human hearts moving in time to eternal love and 
truth. Industries shall then be divine service 
done in the spirit of devoutest worship. Work 
shall be a canticle of praise, the hum of trade a 



THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. 79 

litany of joy, and tread of homeward feet an even- 
ing psalm of praise. 

Humbly learn of Him, who Himself learned 
obedience by that which He suffered. Get growth, 
power, character through obedience to law. Draw 
reliance from Him to whom, because He is truly 
the Son of man, no man may need feel ashamed 
to declare allegiance. Go forward to a brave 
manly success, a success that comes from char- 
acter. 

Look unto Jesus the author and finisher of 
our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him, 
endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set 
down at the right hand of the throne of God, far 
above all authorities, dominions and powers. 
Make His law the fountain of your life, and you 
will never know failure. 



COURTESY. 



Love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous. — i Peter m:8. 

Publius who received us, and lodged us three days courte^ 
ously — Acts xxviii:7. 



IV. 

COURTESY. 

The early part of the 18th century was charac- 
terized by a rare simplicity of confidence and 
stateliness of manners that put to shame our bois- 
terous, hurrying, suspicious age. Then the dream 
of perfect manhood merged into the unconscious 
conviction that man might be made perfect by 
some set formula of words, just as a youth is 
knighted, who kneels down an ordinary individual 
— not to be distinguished from the masses of men 
— and rises a perfect being. There was more 
thought given to manners. ■ 

Then people were not compelled to know w T hat 
all the fools of the world were saying and doing 
yesterday. Says James Russel Lowell, "When 
one sees a picture of that age with its broad skirts, 
its rapiers standing out almost at right angles, and 



84 COURTESY. 

demanding a wide periphery to turn about, one has 
a feeling of spaciousness that suggests mental as 
well as bodily elbow-room. Now all the ologies 
follow us to our burrows, in the newspapers and 
crowd upon us with the pertenacious benevolence 
of subscription books. Even the right of sanctuary 
is denied. The horns of the altar which we fain 
would grasp, have been dissolved into their original 
gases in the attempt to combine chemistry and the- 
ology. " But courtesy represents an idea, and stands 
for a philosophy of life, real and manly, shod with 
gleams of Edenic simplicity and not devoid of 
divine splendor. The word originally portrayed 
the elegance and urbanity of the court, in contrast 
with the soldiery rudeness and privations of camp 
life. 

When the rudeness of the Pretorium had given 
place to the polished elegance and barbaric splen- 
dor of the courts of the Middle Ages manners im- 
proved. This word courtesy originally had to do 
with forms of conduct. The civility and polite- 
ness, the glitter and pomp of royalty, and its sur r 
roundings, were contrasted in sharp Coup D } oeil, 
with the rough manners and boorish trappings of 



COURTESY. 85 

the barons and inferior nobles, on the one hand, 
and the poverty of the masses on the other. Hence 
by a single derivation the term courtesy was de- 
rived from the word Court, signifying the manners 
of him who lived an habitue of princely surround- 
ings. 

But chivalry — the child of poetry and religion — 
springing out of the needs of feudalism and the 
influence of Christianity, put new meaning into 
the word. Under the ameliorating and regenerat- 
ing touch of the Gospel Evangel the flowers of 
courtesy bloomed with unwonted perfume and 
loveliness. It became transplanted from the 
clothes of man to a seat in his heart. The out- 
come of this force lit with love and beautv — a 
bleak and barren age. 

The knightly vow of manliness, bravery, chas- 
tity and courage softened otherwise unmitigated 
horrors. But as education and general enlighten- 
ment advanced, and the spirit of benign civiliza- 
tion saturated the world, courtesy, politeness and 
urbanity kept pace with the increasing growth. 
But the succulent fruits of this heart flowing virtue 
have too often ceased to mature in palaces, where 



86 COURTESY. 

they first saw light, and descended to enrich lowly 
homes and humble hearts. 

The great poet Milton — himself a sufferer from 
the lack of this virtue where it should have most 
abounded — makes the Lady to say to the Shepherd 
in his Comus : 

" I take thy word ; 
And trust thy, honest offer 'd courtesy, 
Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds 
With smoky rafters, than in tap'stry halls 
And courts of princes, where it first was named, 
Yet is most pretended," 

The age of chivalry is dead. Her castles are in 
ruins. Her heroes are gone. Each cloud capped 
tower and gorgeous palace, her pomps and pageant- 
ries have dissolved, but her manly courtesies and 
knightly heroisms have been bequeathed to this 
inexorable age. The age of bronze, the age of 
gold, the age of silver, the age of tin are gone. 
We live in the iron age. Iron wills, iron nerves, 
iron muscles have wrested from the hills their 
treasures and ripped up the mountains, explored 
the depths of nature's secrets, dragged forth the 
giant with more than a hundred hands, and melted 
his hard heart with the blast of the wind and the 



COURTESY. 87 

daughter of the sun. With subtility he has caught 
from his conquerors irresistible might and Protean 
capacity. 

The architect speaks. He lifts his kingly head 

in the stately magnificence of architecture-pillar, 

« 

cornice, capital and frieze. 

The engineer speaks. The giant lays his tire- 
less clasp on a continent, or threads the unseen 
paths of ocean. He plows the deep, and skims on 
the wings of steam across the land. His atlantean 
shoulders hold the world. His stamp is on the 
age, and through iron man is climbing to . his im- 
perial dominion as lord of the physical world. 

The danger is that iron hardened into steel 
shall grasp the heart and shut out the horoscope of 
all but a blind materialism, over which the iron 
king, loftier than the pillars of Carnac, and 
mightier than Egypt's sphinx, sits with mute 
majestic tyranny. 

We need heed the note of warning lest the 
age of iron make men of iron hearts, iron-clad 
consciences and sensibilities. Iron, iron, iron 
everywhere, banishing malleable courtesy. But 
science, the handmaid of religion, aids man's de- 



88 COURTESY. 

vouter and gentler nature by her discoveries. 

True this is the age of iron, yet out of the teem- 
ing forces of the natural world comes forth an 
agency destined to show itself the master of the 
iron king, and the auspicious harbinger of a new 
time. That subtile force, whose appearance only 
we know. Never has eye seen it, or hand handled 
it. Its dawn has already passed. Its sun has 
risen in effulgence upon civilization and marches 
with gigantic strides onward to the full splendor 
of orbicular noon. 

The day of electricity has come, and it will im- 
print its own stamp upon the age to be. What 
subtler force, hidden from achromatic vision, may 
yet rise silently upon the world of man, linking 
the material with the essentially spiritual, until 
no longer through a glass darkly, but face to 
face with the august Originator of all, stands 
a purified, redeemed and perfected humanity? 
When the right key fits the lock, then shall 
the doors swing open, and the obedient and devout 
soul find its way into the destinies of the invisible, 
and come to realize that the unseen is eternal. 

As the purling brook, meandering through 



COURTESY. 89 

sunny meadows, and daintily picking its way 
round mossy rocks, and the mighty river rolling in 
sublime majesty in its course towards the sea, 
must both alike have a reservoir whence their 
supply proceeds, so must the crystal stream of gen- 
uine courtesy, whether manifested in acts of gen- 
tle kindness, or sublime deeds of heroic devotion 
and benevolence flow from a good heart. Heart 
and hand work together, and heart prompts hand. 
A man's heart is seen by his courteous manners. 
Like the sun it gives life and wins its way into 
constant popularity. 

William Wirt wrote to his daughter : " Let me 
tell you a secret. The way to make yourself 
pleasing to others is to show them attention. 
What Stearne so happily calls the small courtesies 
in which there is no parade, whose voice is too 
still to tease. Not the courtesy of a vulgar ambi- 
tion, but the real article — courtesy of a heart that 
loves kindness for its own sake." 

You cannot succeed without heart. The true 
soul is self-forgetful. In art and in religion self- 
annihilation is victory. The curse of conceit and 
self-esteem is defeat. 



90 COURTESY. 

John B. Gough saw one day a street scene of a 
dirty little urchin before a confectioner's window. 
" Would you like some ? " said the distinguished 
orator. " You bet," replied the boy, smacking his 
lips in anticipation of a feast. That night the lec- 
turer told the story to a delighted audience. " You 
made a great hit to-night," said a friend. The 
next evening he lectured again. As he came to 
the place in his discourse where he had brought in 
the street Arab, he said to himself: " John, 
you're going to make a great hit now ! " But his 
audience was mute. The story did not produce a 
ripple. In relating the incident, the orator re- 
marked : " Now, when I tell a story, I leave John 
out." 

The difference between real and sham virtue is 
soon seen. The one is broad^ — esteems not its 
own, but others. This is the opposite of mere 
conventional politeness. Love deals in gold. 
Mock courtesy conceals the base alloy under a 
thin disguise. We want real gifts and genuine, 
that shall speak of the spiritual. 

Genuine courtesy, then, demands sincerity. 
Refinement of speech and manners must robe the 



COURTESY. 91 

beautiful life. Let your speech be filled with 
grace and seasoned with salt. The real soul de- 
clares itself in its humblest words and acts. Born 
of refined sensibilities, true courtesy abounds in 
humble kindnesses. It looks beneath the purple 
of the prince and the beggar's garb, to the jewel of 
soul, chased with the image of the adorable life. 
No man may hope to claim its possession unless 
he can look farther than broad-cloth. It is culti- 
vated sensibility. 

The poet Cowper, himself the soul of courtesy,, 
sings : 

" I would not number 'mongst my list of friends, 
The man, howe'er refined, yet lacking sensibility, 
Doth needlessly set foot upon a worm." 

That was the spirit of Goldsmith, when he 
gave his bed clothing to a poor woman and crept 
into the straw of the tick to sleep himself. 

Courtesy blooms on the stalk of sincerity. Cic- 
ero derives the word sincerity from sine and cera, 
meaning without wax. It is honey clarified of all 
wax. The honey of courtesy has no alloy of base 
motives. 

This virtue never needs to be supported by the 



92 COURTESY. 

crutch of a lie — harmless, officious, malicious — or 
any other lie. The polite fabrications of society 
proclaim its hollowness, and how devoid of sin- 
cerity it is. While her shadow coolly confronts 
me from the balustrade, I do not care to hear the 
mistress instruct her servant to " Tell him I'm not 
-at home." 

That was a good reply that the Irish maid gave 
the mistress, who told her to say she was not at 
-home. 

u What did they say Mary, when you told them 
I was not at home ? " 

11 They said : 4 How fortinit,' mum." 

Said a friend to Atterbury, Bishop at one time 
of Rochester, " Why do you not let your servant 
say to callers, ' I am not at home,' when you don't 
wish to see company ? It is not a lie. It deceives 
nobody." 

M If it is consistent with sincerity, it is not con- 
sistent with the simplicity which becomes a Chris- 
tian Bishop," was his reply. 

But I do not think it is consistent with sincer- 
ity, even. Yet some men imagine that to be sin- 
cere they must be coarse and rude. Vulgar blunt- 



COURTESY. 93 

ness shows a hollow heart as truly as shallow and 
heartless politeness. 

Shakespeare describes such a person : — 

" This is some fellow, — 
Who having been praised for bluntness doth affect 
A saucy roughness and constrains the garb 
Quite from his nature ; he cannot flatter, — he. 
An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth, 
And they will take it so; if not, he's plain. 
These kinds of knaves I know, who in this plainness 
Harbor more craft and more corrupt ends 
Than twenty silly ducking observants. 
That stretch their duties nicely. " 

These kind of people boast of frankness, yet 
make it the bow for the discharge of the arrows 
of their pique, envy, hatred and malice. Opposite 
to this coarseness is that hollow, polished, insin- 
cere hypocrisy, commonly known as French po- 
liteness. Yet no man in the world is more cour- 
teous than the French gentleman. A conven- 
tional gloss, how r ever, does not make a gentleman 
out of a coarse boor. 

The dude that pimples out into manners and 
into poetry, but lacking heart, is ever found to be 
urbane to equals, but brutal to those whom he 
deems his inferiors. 



94 COURTESY. 

Such men deal in tinsel, which glitters over the 
decaying corpse of his majesty myself. 

Let us make a plea for nature, and the natural, 
versus the artificial. Our motto will be the " Put 
yourself in his place. " So we will remember the 
rights and needs of all men, and not blame over- 
much for swearing, the man who sits down on the 
point of a pin. 

Nowhere so much as in the home, and with 
those who form our daily associates within its sa- 
cred circle, is there need of the soul of courtesy. 
" Of all points of good breeding," says Emerson, 
" what I must insist on is deference. This is the 
compliment of self-respect. Every chair should 
be a throne; every member of the household a 
king or queen." 

Where shall we find a happy home, when love 
does not prompt to courtesy. The happy home is 
made by polite, thoughtful regard of others' rights 
and feelings. Giving up the best seat by the fire 
or the window. Amusing the children even at 
cost of much personal inconvenience, to ease the 
burdens of others. Courtesy makes sunshine in 
the parlor and in the living room, lends home its 



COURTESY. 95 

sweetness, its sacredness. At best, we are only a 
short time together, let us make the most of time. 
Is there a place in the world for sweetness and 
light — that place is home. The white immor- 
telles around the coffin will not atone for the 
harshness and bitter words of to-day. 

The home should somehow bespeak the grand- 
eur and imperial quality of our destiny. Let there 
be courtesy in the kitchen; courtesy in the dining 
room, even over burnt bread or meat; and where 
buttons are off and the linen not just right. 

" An English nobleman could not be bound to 
keep the peace ; peace kept him," writes the pen 
of a saint. 

The sun of courtesy will draw off the cloak of 
ill will. In the fable of the wind, the sun and the 
traveler, the sun conquers, where the rude, bois- 
terous wind compels only resistance, and is re- 
pulsed. By sweet tempered courtesy, a sour and 
fretful disposition is thawed out. A certain 
husband kept a diary. Here is the substance 
found written therein : 

Monday, thick fog; Tuesday, cold, chilling; 
Wednesday, sharp frost ; Thursday, cold, cloudy ; 



96 COURTESY. 

Friday, storm, with clearing weather; Saturday, 
gleams of sunshine ; Sunday, southwest wind in 
the morning, calm at noon, hurricane and earth- 
quake at night. 

There must have been but little of the sunshine 
of courtesy in that home on either side. 

Nothing more truly marks true courtesy of the 
heart, and that which breathes the best thought 
and ripe culture of humanity, as it's treatment of 
the aged, or the virtuously ignorant. This virtue 
is something deeper than eternal form. It real- 
izes that usage and custom in polite society are 
not the whole of existence. Eating ice cream 
done up as a bunch of asparagus or an old-fash- 
ioned poke bonnet is not a sine qua non of exist- 
ence. It reads the feelings of others, and learns 
from practical experience the value of the motto, 
" Put yourself in his place." 

Queen of the garden of the heart, and Princess of 
the conduct of life is this jeweled and coronated 
spirit, and a flower of the heart akin to the lofty 
quality we call heroism. The man who has not 
learned to be courteous has not the fibre out of 
which heroes are woven. He was not born with 



COURTESY. 97 

a great soul. He who is moved by heaven-born 
charity in little things, in the crisis of life will be 
true also. 

His trait of deference to authority, and love of 
duty is immortalized in Tennyson's charge of the 
Light Brigade : 

*' 'Charge ! ' was the captain's cry ; 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs but to do and die ; 
Into the valley of death rode the six hundred." 

The age of chivalry, which has bequeathed us 
its spirit, has also left an imperishable example of 
the courteous hero, whose name shall remain tin- 
dimmed while the stars shine. 

Sir Philip Sidney ranks foremost in an age of 
Augustinian splendor for his illustrious valor and 
knightly courtesy. He could bend his knee gal- 
lantly before his maiden queen and reverently be- 
fore his God. His learning and his grace gave 
him renown. Hastening to the battles of his sov- 
ereign in the Netherlands he was quickly wounded 
unto death. Almost frantic with thirst from ex- 
cessive bleeding and fatigue, he called for water 



98 COURTESY. 

A cup was given him. As he raised it to his lips, 
a common soldier, mortally wounded was carried 
by, who fixed his eyes with eager intensity upon 
the cup. Instantly the dying knight gave him the 
water with the remark, " Thy necessity is greater 
than mine." Thus the hero of many praises, the 
courteous Christian knight, departed life. May his 
spirit be the heritage of the kings and queens of 
this 19th century! 

The motive of self-denying acts that crown a 
life breathing saintly beauty, may ever be, " Thy 
necessity is greater than mine." 

If true courtesy holds the candle to light the 
feet down the path where charity's summon 
awaits the doer, were the whole world one blazing 
chrysolite, it might not once be compared to man 
or woman so endowed. When jewels are dust and 
flowers have lost their perfume, such a heart shall 
be a pillow whereon the Son of Man may lay His 
head. For the courtesies that go out from hum- 
ble souls are the everlasting heirlooms of the uni- 
verse, whose echoes are undimmed as heart rever- 
berates to heart. 

The English laureate's musical verse will illus- 



COURTESY. 99 

trate this thought, and help it cling, burr-like, to 
memory : 

'* The splendor falls on castle walls, 
And snowy summits old in story, 
The long light shakes across the lakes, 
And the wild cataract leaps in glory. 

Blow, bugle blow, set the wild echoes flying. 

Blow bugle. Answer echoes dying, dying, dying. 
O, love ! they die in yon rich sky, 

They faint on hill, or field or river, 
Our echoes roll from soul to soul, 

And grow forever and forever." 



THE ROD IN THE HAND, 



The man by earthly wisdom high uplifted, 

Is thus a fool confessed ; 
The lowly spirit God Himself hath chosen, 

As His abiding rest* 

And the Lord said unto him, What is in thine hand ? And 
he said, A rod. 

Exodus iv:2. 



V. 



THE ROD IN THE HAND. 

Moses was a great man. But he did not find 
his greatness until he had emptied himself of all 
commonly reputed as greatness. He stands to- 
day by the burning bush ; by the throne of the 
Pharoahs ; on Mount Sinai; on lonely Nebo. 
Many an archer has bent his bow to bring him 
down. But God has lifted him before the genera- 
tions. A grand majestic personality he defies the 
axe of German criticism and the venomous blow 
of American infidelity. He is one of those men 
who being dead yet speak. His life and speech 
reach us. He touches this nineteenth century. 
There is a message for us in his call and his mis- 
sion. How many boys have been snatched from 
death or obscurity to do a great work in the world. 
God's providence has watched over earthly des- 



104 THE ROD IN THE HAND. 

tiny. A slave child is thrown up from a wreck 
and saved to become a great leader of men. As 
Luther walks with a friend of his boyhood, a bolt 
from heaven smites the friend, but spares the 
future monk and reformer. A waif is picked up 
on the streets of Dublin by a Godly minister. A 
statesman is rescued from the gutter of poverty 
and ignorance, whose eloquence and wisdom are 
to shake a parliament and direct an empire. 

Terrible is the edict of the selfish monarch. 
The Hebrews must be kept down. The boy 
babies must die. Almost a miracle saves the little 
child Moses. Brought up in the court of the 
palace, he becomes learned in all the wisdom of 
the Egyptians. The scholarly priest inducts him 
into the mysteries of religion and civilization. The 
great generals teach him war. At forty, accom- 
plished in all the education of the age, wealth, 
position, prowess, culture, success have not spoil- 
ed him. Out of the palace windows he gazes 
yearningly into the brick-yards. On the field of 
battle he remembers his kin. A thinker, warrior, 
statesman, he dreams of emancipation for his race. 
He thinks he can do it. Surely his people will 



THE ROD IN THE HAND. 105 

reflect the heroic yearning of his own soul. He 
strikes the oppressing, insolent Egyptian, a deed 
imperishable now. It is to be a sign and symbol. 
The heat of liberty is white in the patriot's heart. 
But the clod is not more stupid than the slave ground 
into an automaton beneath the oppressor's heel. 
Moses tried to be a liberator in his own strength. 
He saw the hopelessness of his task. Hollow-eyed 
failure leered at him. Flight was his only refuge. 
But out there in the Arabian desert was his school. 
God had something still to teach him. Then by 
the burning bush the call of God came to him. 

We may learn a lesson from Moses' life for our 
active Christianity to-day. When God called him 
he shrank from the great responsibilities thrust 
upon him. He knew the Egyptians, he knew the 
Hebrews, and begged to be excused. " And 
Moses answered and said: ' But, behold they will 
not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice ; for 
they will say the Lord hath not appeared unto 
thee.' And the Lord said unto him, ' What is that 
in thine hand ? ' And he said, ' A Rod.' " 

You will remember how God made use of that 
rod and the hand that held it. Both became 



106 THE ROD IN THE HAND. 

pregnant with supernatural energy, and gave birth 
to convincing prodigies. Moses 5 life affords us 
many parallels to the life of the Christian teacher 
and worker to-day. That rod was, in its simplicity 
and apparent inefficiency, like the cross and its 
preaching, that to so many appear foolishness, but 
to the believing are the power of God unto salva- 
tion. 

I remark then, in the first place, " Moses was 
called to a difficult mission. " He was to liberate 
a race of slaves. The mighty power of Egypt's 
throne was arrayed against him and his under- 
taking. Not a soul in all Egypt was in sympathy 
with the movement he hoped to inaugurate. 

John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry was calm, 
cool and statesmanlike, compared with the rash 
venture of this Hebrew shepherd, who, after ab- 
senting himself for a generation from his people, 
attempted their emancipation. 

Then the Hebrews were slaves. They were 
content to be such. To live and die under the eye 
of their taskmasters seemed to be their highest am- 
bition. It is one thing to heed the cry " come and 
help us." Quite another to awaken the need that 



THE ROD IN THE HAND. 107 

shall create the cry. This last was what Moses 
was compelled to do. With his rod in his hand, he 
had first of all to convince his countrymen that 
they needed the salvation he had been sent to of- 
fer them and to secure for them. 

Just here is Moses' work analogous to the mis- 
sion of the gospel now. The great need of sinners 
is to feel their need. To know that they are held 
in bondage to the world. Socrates was wont to 
say his work was a negative one ; to bring men 
from tmconscious ignorance to co7iscious ignorance. 
We can feel the full force of this only when we 
remember, that, before we can learn we must know 
that we do not know. Before a sinner can be 
brought to Christ he must feel his need of Christ. 
So we have a side light thrown upon the opera- 
tions of conscience. Men in their religious life are 
not accustomed to examine themselves closely. A 
few big deformities or glaring iniquities are set up 
as monumental stones and carefully marked " Sin?* 
If a man does not stumble over any of these he 
congratulates himself as living in a state of com- 
parative righteousness. He prefers not to think 
or feel deeper. The Redeemer's words, and the 



108 THE ROD IN THE HAND. 

electric flash of the cross are not sent down the 
long avennes of retrospection, where the hidden 
thoughts and affections of the soul bubble and leap 
and surge under the spur of passion or the lash of 
the world. 

Men do not yearn for liberty, because they fail 
to perceive their bondage. But when faith seizes 
it, the Gospel becomes the Rod in the Hand, con- 
vincing the soul and scourging its enemies. 

The man who longs most for liberty need not 
be the most abject slave ; but he who feels his 
manacles gall him the most, and the sweet light of 
liberty shine in his soul most keenly. The man 
who feels most deeply the " exceeding sinfulness of 
sin " need not be the greatest sinner. 

The closer to Christ the more passionate the ar- 
dor for a character crystalline in righteousness. 
In the glare of noonday the smallest dust speck is 
seen. Here in Columbus there has been a mar- 
velous renovation in the last year. Still there is 
a great cry for cleanliness. I see the officers of 
the Board of Health are in good demand yet. Is 
it that we have been on the retrograde in this re- 
spect ? Are we dirtier than we were ? Oh, no. 



THE ROD IN THE HAND. IO9 

Men's eyes have grown keener under the rising 
dread that the great scourge was coming to visit 
us, once again. The city has been purified. Old 
nooks and old corners have been cleaned out. Cel- 
lars and cesspools and dark places have been 
scoured and scrubbed and whitewashed and sweet- 
ened. The city was never so clean as it is just 
now. And yet it never seemed so dirty. We have 
learned a little to appreciate cleanliness. The 
eye is sharp. All the senses are acute. And we 
are all clamoring for purification. 

Just so is it in man's attempt at personal holi- 
ness. House cleaning in the soul is like the task the 
good housewife has before her. The more shut- 
ters you open, the more light you let in, the more 
dust you dig out from the corners and crevices, 
the more cobwebs you brush down, the more there 
is to do. The little faults and sins vou never saw 
before now demand rectification and purification, 
till the soul is lifted higher and higher towards the 
matchless perfection of the adorable Christ ; until 
walking in the sunny splendor of the cross the 
Christian sings all the day long : 



IIO THE ROD IN THE HAND. 

" In the cross of Christ I glory, 

Towering o'er the wrecks of time, 
All the light of sacred story 
Gathers round its head sublime, " 

So I am brought to notice the preparation of 
Moses for his work. Time and discipline were 
needed to ripen him for so grand a mission. "So 
much time !" the unthinking exclaim. That careful 
education in Egypt was wasted. Forty years in 
the wilderness was time thrown away. No ! He 
needed just this training. Two-thirds of his life 
was spent in getting ready, one-third in the actual 
accomplishment of a career. But all this prepara- 
tion was only commensurate with the vastness of 
the task set before him. He saw the schemes of 
his youth fall crashing around him. One thing 
was to be learned. His own inefficiency ; that all 
efficiency is of God, Through valleys of sorrow, 
amid the ashes of bitter disappointments he came 
to find God in the burning bush,, and learn that 
the rod in the hand is might enough with Him for 
the sublimest achievement. So God has always 
taken time to prepare men for His work. How 
like the Man of Sorrows, on the stern sad side of 
his nature, the truly great men of the world have 



THE ROD IN THE HAND. Ill 

been. They have learned to wait and to bear. A 
Samuel, a David, a Paul, an Augustine, a Crom- 
well, a Dante, a Milton have been chiseled, and 
chastened, and refined by sorrow\ Not on the 
mountain-top of joy, but in the lowly valleys of 
sorrow souls develope. 

Thus fibre of the soul is knitted, and the powders 
of man made great to minister to humanity. So 
the great books of the world and the great paint- 
ings of the world are steeped in tears of sorrow. 
This is God's way. Does it seem strange ? He 
leads men to-day in the same path. How did 
your spiritual life bud and blossom ? Was it the 
heyday of joy ? Disappointment and sorrow came. 
The dream of self and selfish achievements was 
broken. The process was long. That empty 
cradle, those shattered hopes, brought you to God, 
to faith, to prayer. The ripened Christian char- 
acter, so subtile and delicate, will take time also. 

Said a very old woman, "I was a girl when 
Cromwell stopped at the Castle of Knaresborough. 
They sent me into the great man's room to warm 
the bed with a warming-pan. When I went out I 
looked through the keyhole. I saw Cromwell 



112 THE ROD IN THE HAND. 

cross the room, and kneel down by the bed and 
pray. I went away and after awhile came back 
and peeped in again. There he was praying yet." 
" How many of us," says Hood as he relates the 
anecdote, " could stand the test of the key-hole? " 
Sure enough, " How many? " 

Still further, I remark, how apparently inade- 
quate were the means Moses had for so great a 
purpose. To conquer a throne and emancipate a 
race, what had he ? What is that in thine hand ? 
and he said, " A rod." " Poor means," you say. 
But that rod was enough when the supernatural 
power of the Infinite once transformed it. God 
uses simple means, and those that are at hand for 
great ends. How simple the Gospel is ! The 
cross in its plainness stands the symbol of emanci- 
pation. Not for one nation, but for humanity. 
This is to reform, free, save each one of us. Only 
we are to remember, God is doing it. He keeps 
hold of the reins of Destiny. The work must be 
done in His way. With the Gospel in his hand, 
and looking up to the Cross the Christian may 
shout : 

" Jesus shall reign where're the sun 
Does his successive journeys run." 



THE ROD IN THE HAND. II3 

Lastly, I call your attention to the humility of 
Moses. He felt unfit for the great work to which 
God had called him. 

The terrors of the task flash upon him. There 
were the power of Pharoah, and the stupidity, and 
superstition of the Hebrews to be overcome. 

"I am not eloquent, Lord," he cries, u just send 
somebody else.' 5 

That sense of unfitness and helplessness comes 
to every man who would do God's work. However, 
he may start out thinking he has great force or 
power to help to reform, and bless humanity, he 
must lose all that if he is to do any real or effect- 
ive work. He may lose his self-consciousness in 
his work, or better still, he may lose self in his 
trust in a higher and diviner power working in 
and through him. Then he sees that brain, heart, 
nerve, discipline and culture are only God's in- 
struments. 

The Lord told Moses He was near to help him. 
" I will be with thy mouth and teach thee what to 
say." 

Here is a lesson of humility for the ministry, 
and for every Christian. It is a good thing when 



114 THE ROD IN THE HAND. 

a young Christian feels his unfitness for a holy life 
work. There is hope for such a one in reliance 
on the Redeemer's help. 

The gospel promises help to those who ask. 
God wants His work done in His own way. 

An English preacher tells of a stranger who 
came to a place in his way where a gate crossed 
the road. A little girl stood beside it, and as he 
approached closed the gate. He indignantly re- 
monstrated. "Oh, all you've got to do is to ask," 
said the child, u and I will open the gate." He 
did as he was bidden, and the gate no longer bar- 
red his progress. The owner of that land simply 
wanted to preserve the right of way to himself. 
Hence the gate. So divine grace in the gospel 
keeps the gate of life immortal. The Infinite Fath- 
er holds in His own hand the right of way. Ask 
and it shall be given you, seek and you shall find. 

There is no salvation, no emancipation, no great 
work to be done without dependence upon Him. 
Like the mission of the great leader wrought out 
so long ago, the mission of the Christian life is a 
difficult one. It needs preparation. Have your 
sorrows taught you to lean on Him ? 



THE ROD IN THE HAND. 115 

Is Heaven a great reality ? On what is your 
dependence for success ? Let the great leader of 
Israel teach you humility. Do you feel unfit for 
God's service ? Do you despair of doing aught 
for man ? Would you be excused ? God comes 
to you, Christ says " what is that in thine hand?" 
Is it only a rod ? 

Have you any hold on the gospel ? Is the cross 
in your hand? Let the cross of Jesus, and the 
gospel of the Son of God be as insignificant as 
that old rod in the shepherd's hand, if your trust 
is in God, poor heart, they shall be unto you and 
unto this weary world the power of God unto sal- 
vation. 



THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY, 



He felt) with indescribable strength and sweetness , that the 
lovely time of youth is our Italy and Greece, full of gods, 
temples, and bliss ; and which, alas! so often Goths and Vandals 
stalk through, and strip with their talons. 

The glory of young men is their strength* 

Prov. xx:29. 



VI. 



THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 

No man ever knew better than Solomon, the 
strength and weakness of youth. He was, himself, 
young and tender when he came to the throne, 
and its terrible temptations. Out of his passion- 
ate sorrows, and deep experiences, and humiliat- 
ing defeats, he has left in this Book of Proverbs, a 
monument full of warning and instruction for the 
youth of all ages. What man stronger than he, in 
splendor of youth and glory of manhood ? Who 
ever possessed such opportunities, or who exhibits 
so well the lessons of glory despoiled and strength 
bound captive ? The young man is proud of his 
strength. There is something in the might of 
brain, muscle, and passion that makes him leap 
up in exultation at their boundless possibilities. 
But it is the very strength of youth that is led cap- 



120 THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 

tive by the spirit of the world. The brightest, 
quickest, keenest, glorying in the invulnerable 
majesty of youth, have gone forth, in the gay 
morning of life, jubilant with visions of conquest. 
The prizes of the w T orld catch their eyes. The 
charioteers in the great amphitheater of the city's 
street, jostle, tempt and lure them onward. Ask 
the silent watchman under the stars, u Watchman, 
what of the night ? Is the young man safe ?" 
" Fallen ! fallen ! fallen !" is too often the answer. 
It's a drunkard's grave. It's a criminal cell. His 
bones are bleaching on the sands where the sirens 
play, all careless of the ruin their song has wrought. 
How are the mighty fallen ! A young man went 
out from his New England home. He became a 
racer in the city's strife. He was strong in the 
pride of youth, strong in susceptibilities to ten 
thousand influences. But there was a stronger than 
he. His master found him in the way. He 
wrestled and w r as thrown. He returned to his 
father's house a wreck, morally, physically, intel- 
lectually. Blasted ! blasted ! a ruined character 
forever. Let him stand for thousands. 

Opposed to the strength born of pride, which is 



THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 121 

the glory of youth, the young man meets with a 
three-fold temptation on the very threshold of life. 
Opposed to his delicate and pliant sensibilities are 
immense and subtle influences, reeking with the 
miasma of evil. 

And just here must the problem of the young- 
man's life be met in our large centres of popula- 
tion. They are ; 

The strength of the sensual. 

The strength of the present life. 

The strength of the customs of society. 

And through these channels the world marshals 
her forces against youth, and counteracts the in- 
fluences of Church and religion. 

The young man's strength seems exhaustless. 
Engaged in dissipation all night, he can work all 
day. But by and by he is marked as going down- 
ward. The world has won its victory over him. 
Strength met strength and was foiled. He is lost 
to virtue, and by this I mean more than chastity. 
I mean manliness, moral goodness, integrity. The 
power of the sensual life has captivated him. 

Again, the strength of the present enslaves him. 
He thinks that every day will be like to-day. Tell 



122 THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY.' 

him death is at the door, that out of every certain 
company one must stand before the Judge of all 
the living ere the year shall close. " You cannot 
mean me," he exclaims, " peradventure I shall 
escape." So the world wins its victory over him. 

Once more, it is the strength of custom that 
claims his allegiance. It is the manner of society, 
the way of the world that he dare not disobey. 
Thus he is a willing slave. And the world, the 
flesh and the devil win the day. 

The young man, bound hand and foot by socie- 
ty, boasts, "It is the custom of the times ; I cannot 
help it. One does not want to appear eccentric. 
I must get on in life." Or, again, he has not inde- 
pendence, sufficient manhood and intelligence, to 
map out his own course upon the chart of life and 
stick to it. The influences around him are tre- 
mendous. The age is lax. Sensuality and avarice 
prey upon him. He inclines a little to the wrong. 
Alas! now the waves are over his head ; he drifts ; 
his will is paralyzed ; he is swept headlong with 
the current. The world claims him as her own. 

But let us arraign these forces that threaten the 
young man's strength and despoil his glory, before 



THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 123 

the bar of justice, manhood and the judgment of 
our better selves. 

I will mention, first, the temptations that come 
from the love of money and of place. The lad 
aims at being a rich man. He sees, early, the 
deference paid to money. To be rich is the one 
passion of his existence. How sharply he interro- 
gates persons and things around him. This man 
made his money selling rum. This one was lucky 
with a lottery ticket. This one came into wealth 
by questionable transactions on change. In his 
maddening thirst the meretritious dazzles him. 
His heart runs wild. He that trusteth his own 
heart is a fool, says Solomon. But, blinded by 
passion, the man trusts the emotions of his heart. 
To him its deceits are rosy with prospective suc- 
cess. 

The slow growth of well planted seed he forgets. 
The gradual rise of true and worthy men, who 
have risen from small beginnings to affluence and 
influence by integrity and " toiling upward in the 
night, " are all forgotten. The golden eagles in 
the grasp of incompetency dazzle him. He 
reaches, clutches, and, when too late, perhaps, 



124 THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 

finds he has grasped dross instead of value, and 
vanity instead of prosperity. 

From all over the civilized world come mighty 
and sinister voices declaring the frightful growth 
of immorality. 

And in a measure I believe this is due to the 
modern method of doing business, and to the cos- 
mopolitan character stamped upon the age, by our 
tremendous system of steam railroads. To-night 
in the sanctity of home and quiet village, to-mor- 
yow morning the youth is rushing through the ave- 
nues of trade in New York, Chicago or Boston. 
Last night it was the mother's smile, or the fath- 
er's restraining influence, home and purity. To- 
night it is "What shall I do? Where shall I go?" 
The hotel is irksome. The harpies and sharpers are 
on his track. "Come," they say, "there is a good 
time down here — elegant entertainment ; magnifi- 
cent place." Ask them what it means. These imps 
of darkness will tell you "It's business." The poor 
fool whom they are luring on and downward never 
sees the skeleton behind the mask. 

"Where does he go? What does he do?" you 
ask. 






THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 125 

Isolated from home, from church, mother, sis- 
ter, thronged by temptations, what may he not do ? 
" He ought to be man enough to resist," you say. 
I know what he ought to do, but I want you to 
realize now, as never before, what he does do, alone 
in the great city. I want you to feel, as never 
before the duty of the Church toward the young 
man in our city, mastered, as he too often is, by 
passion within and tempters without. 

Money does not roll in as fast as he would like 
to see it, so he gambles just a little in stocks and 
futures. He must be rich. Now he is in the sumpt- 
uous palace. Faro, cards and dice are indulg- 
ed in, just a little, to try his luck, at first. Again 
he dips deeper. Dishonor sits with him. Ghast- 
ly suicide leers over his shoulder. He has stolen 
his employer's wealth. Downward he goes; into 
the great ranks of the morally smirched and dis- 
eased, silently, it may be, but, perhaps, emblazon- 
ed on the banner of scandal, to feast the public 
eyes, and callous the public taste still further than 
it is. 

Again, the young man says he cannot marry. 
The girls want too much of pride, pomp, and cir- 



126 THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 

cumstance. He must have a big establishment, 
support an equipage. He cannot afford to marry ; 
a wife is a too expensive luxury. But I believe, 
from the bottom of my heart, that, blinded by his 
own cursed avarice, he sees woman through the 
baleful darkness of his own selfishness, not as she 
really is. 

The death blow was given to the old Roman 
civilization by the breaking up of the family rela- 
tion. Bachelors took their ease and refused to 
marry. The pillars of the state fell, and the 
empire came crashing down with them. Gibbon, 
meditating amid the ruins of the coliseum, mourn- 
ed over the fall of the Roman empire. " But," 
thought the great historian, " we have iron and 
fire, our civilization will last." But strange to 
say he forgot that Rome had iron and fire. She 
fell when, in the loss of the family, she lost man- 
hood and honor, and all that conserves the high- 
est influences of state. And woe be to our civiliza- 
tion, if it ends in the brothel and the whiskey 
shop. We have iron and fire, but we have more, 
we have Christ. 

L,et us ask ourselves squarely, what are the 
facts regarding customs of our times ? 



THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 1 27 

Stated as delicately as we dare to put it, the aver- 
age young man who has no home is too often 
found in the house, which is the way to hell, going 
down to the chambers of death. 

" What can laws do without morals," writes 
Franklin. And all over the so-called Christian 
world may be observed, in these last decades, this 
frightful growth of immorality. Everywhere the 
liquor power seems to grow T stronger. Rum, 
drunkenness and crime, beastly trio, leap and 
caper, hand in hand, in the hideous dance of 
death. 

In England drunken criminals increased in 
number, in a little more than one decade, from 
four hundred and tw r o per one hundred thousand 
of population to eight hundred and forty-nine. 
In Massachusetts, between i860 and 1879, crimes 
from drunkenness arose from six thousand three 
hundred and thirty-four to sixteen thousand two 
hundred and eleven. In six years, in Prussia, 
crime increased sixty-five per cent. 

As crime increases, the alarming grow r th in the 
number of suicides is a significant sign of the 
times. But hereditary wickedness and criminality 



128 THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 

find their most awful illustration in the monstrous 
growth of licentious practices. New York has six 
hundred brothels, with more than ten thousand in- 
mates. And every city in the land is cursed with 
these plague spots and fever sores. Why do I in- 
trude this dark side of our civilization to your at- 
tention to-night? 

Not, surely, to cast a cloud over you, or to ap- 
pear indelicate in this sacred presence. But, be- 
cause, it is our young men that help to swell the 
ranks of the criminal classes to an appalling de- 
gree. Saloons, billiard rooms, dance halls, and 
houses of vice found in all our large villages, cities 
and towns depend for their support largely on the 
patronage of young men. Go to the penitentiary 
and face the crowd gathered of a Sunday morning 
in the prison chapel, as I do sometimes, and your 
heart will ache for the young men incarcerated 
there. 

In one house of correction in a western city the 
records showed one thousand seven hundred and 
seventy-three inmates, one thousand seven hun- 
dred and seventy-two of whom were young men 
between the ages of sixteen and thirty-two. 



THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 129 

In an Eastern prison where no boys are confined, 
the average age of its nineteen hundred criminals is 
less than twenty-four years. The cost to one coun- 
ty of convicting a single criminal was $10,000, of 
executing another was $30,000. To maintain the 
liquor saloons $2,000,000 are required, while 
worse places in cities not a great ways from Colum- 
bus are sumptuously fitted up at a cost from $8,000 
to $10,000, while two thousand dollars are given 
grudgingly for a Christian Association. It is esti- 
mated that but fifteen per cent, of the young men 
of this country attend church with any regularity. 
Only five per cent, are members of Churches,, 
seventy-five per cent, never go at all. Small, in- 
deed, is the attendance of young men at church, 
prayer-meeting, Sunday school or any other re- 
ligious service, comparatively speaking, in this, 
goodly city of ours. 

The runners of hell are out in force. Shame- 
lessly they ply their traffic filching souls for 
their hire. The commercial travelers of " Satan^ 
World and Company" go to and fro with tireless 
energy. Their w r ares are largely for young men. 
They, too, are set to win souls. To them is 



130 THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 

known no night of sleep or Sabbath of rest. They 
never stop. Right here they are ever alert for 
young men. 

A young man, teller in a village bank, but un- 
acquainted with the city's ways, went down to 
Philadelphia on important business for the bank. 
He was proud of his trust. It was to be his first 
visit to the city. Secretly he thought, as many 
another has done, I will see a little of life now. As 
he sat at supper in the hotel, the first time after 
his arrival, two letters were handed him. Both 
bore the postmark of the city. Who knew him in 
that vast throng of strangers ? he queried. " There 
are wide awake folks down here," replied the col- 
ored waiter to his wondering look. 

One was an invitation to a low resort for the 
morrow, which was Sunday. The other an offer 
from the Y. M. C. A. to escort him to any church 
he might wish to attend. Which would he take ? 
The temptation was mighty, but the influence of 
those young men was great. Conscience and duty 
triumphed. He was saved from what beginning ? 
from what career ? who can tell ? 

Suppose there had been no Christian on the 



THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 131 

lookout, who dare tell what that Sunday in the 
city might have begun? He thanked God that 
night that he was saved. 

This same thing may find repetition in our city 
any time. The hosts of Satan are gathering for a 
final assault. The world is to be captured for the 
devil or for Christ. If the young man can be 
gained the battle is won. For on his character 
depends the future of the land, the Church, and the 
world. 

The day is past when a merchant can just open 
his shop and display his goods. Let his stock be 
ever so choice, his prices low, his treatment of 
patrons polite, his eagerness to sell great, the o4d- 
fashioned way of doing business will not bring 
success. He must advertise his wares. His cus- 
tomers must have their goods brought to the door 
for inspection or his go-ahead-ative neighbor, even 
with inferior goods, will snatch the trade. 

The age has its own methods. Success is re- 
cured by using the channels' through which the 
traffic of the times passes. The railroad and the 
newspaper have revolutionized the world's way of 
buying and selling. Just so it is in methods of 



132 THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 

Christian work. It is not enough simply to open 
a church. We have plenty of churches, you say. 
Not so. We need more. We have plenty of 
stores in Columbus some people think. But 
when a new firm comes and opens a new 
store for private gain, you call that energy, or en- 
terprise. Shall the Christian Church have less 
faith, energy, enterprise, than men following the 
instincts of trade ? 

The Church must reach out. She needs her 
scouts, her pickets, her outposts, her commercial 
runners. It is not enough to elaborate sermons in 
elegantly adorned churches on Salvation of Souls, 
and the Divine Government, in order to save men. 
Religion must be made to appear what the Gos- 
pel makes it, not a theory, not a sentiment, but a 
reality. Religion is living right before our fellow 
men, and when we do that we are following Christ 
and living right towards God. 

Mortify therefore your members which are upon 
the earth, cries the apostle. Abstinence from lying, 
stealing, and cultivation of purity of life, that is 
Christianity. The demand of the Gospel, the 
need of the age is, that this sort of religion be 



THE YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 1 33 

preached to men. And in view of the facts we 
have reviewed to-day, especially does this sort of 
religion need to be preached to our young men. 
The Church must run swiftly if she save the per- 
ishing of this class. Every inspiration of faith 
must be gained, every fortress of the enemy must 
be assaulted. Who is to lead in this crusade for 
the salvation of young men ? Who but our 
young men, urged on by the marshaled strength 
of the whole Church militant. Cheered on by the 
cross of Jesus and Him who hung upon it, let the 
Church call to its advancing columns : 

" Stand up ! stand up, for Jesus ; 
Ye soldiers of the Cross." 

Or that other battle cry : 

'Stand up ! stand up, for Jesus ; 

The trumpet call obey. 
Forth to the mighty conflict 

In this his glorious day ; 
Ye that are men now serve Him, 

Against unnumbered foes, 
Your courage rise with danger 

And strength to strength oppose " 

Now, the young man may be reached. By and 
by it may be too late. Said an earnest minister, 
some years ago, in New Jersey, as the vile life of 
a criminal, sentenced to be hung, w r as near its end, 



134 T HK YOUNG MAN'S GLORY. 

" Christian people tried in vain to tell him of a 
Saviour's love. He answered their solicitude with 
blasphemy, and spurned them with the statement, 
that, had they shown him the one hundredth part 
of the attention, when he was a fresh young lad, 
that they had shown him when under the shadow 
of the gallows, he might have turned out a decent 
man." Now is the time to angle for the soul of 
the young man, in the deep pools of the world, ere 
he is in a prison cell, or the victim of lust. His 
glory is his strength. Take him to Christ, and 
that glory shall be the strength of Christian char- 
acter. A strength no foe shall ever conquer; a 
glory no cloud shall ever dim. 



THE GREAT PROBLEM. 






Who ivalks within the light of God, 

No earthly cares annoy ; 
Resigned^ beneath the chastening rod, 

He's calm amid life's joy. 

But seek ye first the kingdom of God arid His righteous- 
ness, and all these things shall be added unto you. 

Matt. 71:33. 



1 



VII. 



THE GREAT PROBLEM. 

It was a strange company that gathered to hear 
the sermon on the Mount. The marvelous doc- 
trine of the divine care of life fell on ears ac- 
customed to hear the sighs of poverty or the 
merciless exactions of the tax gatherer. We need 
to understand their situation to comprehend the 
words of the Master. To them a rich man meant 
a pitiless leech, fat with the people's blood. 
They caught the meaning of the Saviour's words : 
" It is harder for a camel to go through the eye of a 
needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom 
of heaven." But, although the wrongs of society 
were so great, Jesus did not denounce faction, 
preach political economy, and set capital arrayed 
against labor, or organize a crusade of poverty 
against riches. He saw the right for the ages. 



138 THE GREAT PROBLEM. 

He laid His ax at the root. His teachings are 
broad principles — true as the everlasting righteous- 
ness. There may be many apparent exceptions 
just now, but in the long run, His words, His 
principles shall be vindicated before the race. 

Here is such a principle : " Seek ye first the 
kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all 
these things shall b§ added unto you." 

What is the kingdom of God ? you ask. Not a 
dream. Not a vision seen only down the far 
vistas of eternity. " Neither shall they say, lo 
here! or lo there ! for, behold, the kingdom of God 
is within you." Paul declares, " The kingdom of 
God is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy 
Ghost." Again he utters the same truth when he 
says, " The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, 
long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meek- 
ness, temperance." And James turns the same 
thought into other words when he declares, " The 
fruit of righteousness is sown in peace for them 
that make peace." 

By all of which we may understand, that, the 
kingdom of God is within man, and its fruits, the 
religious principles of a life. If we live in the 



THE GREAT PROBLEM. 1 39 

Spirit let us also walk in the Spirit! But if a 
man is devout, godly and religious, he is not al- 
ways successful. No ! we live in a complex world. 
The effects of unrighteousness are often entailed. 
If a good man makes a mistake he must stand the 
brunt. But our Lord declares, righteousness and 
integrity are good for advancement in the things of 
this life. All short-sighted exceptions and preju- 
dices sw T ept aw r ay, the principle will find its vin- 
dication all about us. All things considered the 
religious man will prosper. If a man lives with 
a sense of the Divine care of life, brooding above 
him, as the white pinions of angels, his aims will 
be loftier, his means to attain them purer. 

It is the letting of the power of the endless life 
down into this that all men need. The sense of 
the truly religious helps a man to think, judge, 
feel and live better. The super sensuous in relig- 
ion lifts a man into a higher moral and religious 
being. The earnest of the spirit . flashing on 
him, the foregleams of the immortal life inspire 
him to make the most of himself here. A just 
appreciation of the value of the soul — of self- — is 
not selfishness. There is a selfhood, divine and 



I40 THE GREAT PROBLEM. 

holy, devoutly accepting the imperishable value 
the Infinite has stamped upon the individual. 
There is a selfishness, bloated, pampered and 
cursed with its own insatiable demands, quench- 
less as the fire of the pit. The one lives making 
the kingdom of God foremost in thought, in home, 
in business, in the world of men. The other sees 
no higher throne, no diviner majesty than self. 
And this is true of the rich man and the poor 
man, the working man class and all other classes. 
But the man who lives with the power of the 
Immortal in him lifts all life to its higher plane. 
Work to him is worship. Toil is the chiseling on 
character of imperishable traits that shall gleam 
on the full-blown blossom of eternity. He feels, 
he knows, that man, 

" Though once a worm — a thing that crept 

On the bare earth, then wrought a tomb and slept, 
This puny man from his cell of clay 
Shall burst a seraph in the blaze of day." 

For, as the worm is marked with some of the 
gorgeous tints that appear on the radiant wings of 
the butterfly, flashing in the sunlight, so is the 
chrysalis of the soul traced with some supernal 
gleams to appear in the resurrection glory. And 



THE GREAT PROBLEM. 141 

this sense of the immortal in religion should keep 
men fast to eternal verity, and lead the righteous 
to place the kingdom of God foremost in all 
worldly transactions. Such a religious man makes 
everything converge to his spiritual growth. He 
asks, w^hat does the kingdom of God demand 
here? 

But if I go out on High street, men tell me they 
don't want religion there. It's too prim a com- 
panion. It's too apt to stick a brad into the ribs 
of conscience just when the cap-stone descends on 
a sharp transaction. It's nonsense ! Religion 
isn't profitable for business. You steer clear of a 
religious man. It is often thought that the man 
who proclaims his religion in business is a sham, 
a cheat, a hypocrite, so saturated with humility, 
sweetness, light and soft-headed piety, on the out- 
side, that he carries a concealed dagger, deeply 
engraved " Number One," within. I don't blame 
a business man for being afraid of voluble religi- 
osity, that asks after vour soul with its breath, and 
steals your purse with its right hand. 

But it is a mistake, a blunder, a misconception 
of a God-given principle to place pure religion 



142 THE GREAT PROBLEM. 

and undefiled in that category. For the religion 
of the New Testament is replete with holy wis- 
dom. " The wisdom that is from above is first 
pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, 
full of mercy and good fruits, without wrangling 
and without hypocrisy ; and the fruit of righteous- 
ness is sown in peace of them that make peace. " 
Is not that wisdom good for business ? Does real 
religion unfit a man for life's tasks ? Can't a man 
be diligent in business and pray in the prayer 
meeting, teach in the Sunday school, and be a 
devout worshiper in the sanctuary ? Should a 
man have less or more integrity because he 
believes this life the prelude of an eternal exist- 
ence ? 

A Christian man ought to take his religious 
principles — the kingdom of God — into business. 
Not in his words, but in his deeds, he is to preach 
Christ. Religion and business, the sacred and 
the secular, should be wedded. There is no dif- 
ference. We need to learn the sacredness of what 
we call the secular. The gospel joins them. It 
is an awful blunder to divorce them. Disaster 
lurks in waiting for the individual, the commun- 



THE GREAT PROBLEM. 143 

ity, the nation, that gives heed to Mammon 
instead of the law of righteousness. 

This means speaking the truth, making no false 
representations, being merciful, taking no advant- 
age of a brother's necessities to get a ten dollar 
article for five, and calling it a "bargain." Most 
of the successful merchants, mechanics, manufact- 
urers and business men of this city were once poor 
boys and workingmen themselves. Is there any 
justice in their grinding the face of the poor now ? 

Is there any righteousness in our great corpora- 
tions keeping a poor man out of his wages for a 
month, and then allowing him but three weeks 
wages ? But his money goes to the grog shops ! 
Does it ? Then shut up the saloons. No wonder 
the poor man shuns the church door. Isn't his 
employer calmly worshiping there ? I recently 
canvassed a section of this city, house by house. 
There were the homes of the poor. Out of two 
hundred and fifty families only twenty-five ever 
darkened the church door. One poor woman 
told me she went to church recently, and added 
" The minister talked beautifully about the 
poor, but it didn't help us any." The King- 



144 TH B GREAT PROBLEM. 

dom of God means the brotherhood of man. 
The rich and the poor meet together, and God 
is the maker of them all. There are no artificial 
distinctions in this Kingdom. All men are the 
sons of God. 

Again, the civil law, the legal qnibble, is not 
the standard for the Christian. His religion is oi 
the gospel. His standard of right the eqnity of 
the Kingdom of God. " Yon can get $500 ont of 
him," says the lawyer. " But it's not right," says 
the plain God-fearing man. " It is legally yours," 
says the man of law. " Take it, you ain't a fool, 
are you? "You say that I can get the $500?" 
u Yes." " But it's not mine in equity, only legal." 
" Yes." " That's the way of it." " I don't want 
the $500." "Why not?" "I must die some 
time." "Fool," sneers the worldling. 

To the truly religious man, the gospel standard 
is the rule. The morality of the court and the 
shop is not his morality. Eternal righteousness 
overshadows all his days. 

But religious men are not always successful. 
Sometimes men of high religious notions, of de- 
vout prayerfulness, goodness and liberality, get 



THE GREAT PROBLEM. 145 

shoved aside. If we look underneath the surface 
of affairs we may observe the reason of it. Sin 
lies at the door somewhere. They do not always 
take counsel of the kingdom of God. A man does 
not say, " How can I best subserve the kingdom 
of God in my business ? What would Christ have 
me do at this crisis of my life ?" The problem of 
problems is left unproposed, and unsolved. Ruin 
sweeps down on the business career. 

What are the causes that lead to so much meagre 
success, or positive failure in the business world ? 
One great reason of disaster is mammon worship. 
Manhood, honor, religion, everything is sacrificed 
to this hideous idol. A young man craves wealth 
and position. He begins with high ideas of integ- 
rity, deep religious enthusiasm. Captivated by 
the prizes of the world, he forgets to gauge his 
motives, and compare his actions with the gospel 
standards, the religion he professes. Then comes 
a crisis. He is weighed. Found wanting. He 
passes out and down into the ranks of those whose 
once blameless integrity has been smirched with 
dishonor. 

Again, another cause of disaster is pride. A 



146 THE GREAT PROBLEM. 

man must have as large an establishment as his 
neighbor. How many men have met their 
Waterloo by spreading their business over too large 
a surface ? A hundred furnaces must be kept run- 
ning. Every one of them with a hundred irons at 
white heat. When a man forgets the divine care 
of life, ignores the kingdom of God, and goes 
ballooning in business pride, he is on the verge of 
awful disaster. God gives a man a mission in life 
to care for his household, to minister to that circle 
of friends dependent upon him, and work becom- 
ing deeds of benevolence. He has one garden to 
cultivate ; one kernel of corn to grow. When he 
puts forth his hand to steal his neighbor's kernel, 
woe betide him. How many men there are who 
were not content with a legitimate business. 
Their avarice was moral ruin. Seeking to make 
their million ten millions thev awake to find it 
zero. When will men learn that the pride of 
avarice is immoral ? 

Again, men rush into business, seeking not the 
kingdom of God, but to grow rich quickly. What 
guarantee have they of success ? Nothing but the 
hallucinations of their own imaginations and the 



THE GREAT PROBLEM. 147 

gambling spirit that posseses them. They have 
not taken counsel with their ability, resources or 
integrity. The kingdom of God never enters 
their dream. When will men learn that incom- 
petency is moral and financial suicide ? Incom- 
petency vaunting itself in place of knowledge and 
ability is downright wickedness, and such men 
help to swell the stupendous catalogue of financial 
failures in the land. Would that humility were 
not a lost virtue, angel that she is, to lead men to 
the vision of their need of the kingdom of God. 

If we could but have the lives or our great 
financial criminals emblazoned before us, and all 
the secrets disclosed that led them step by step to 
the hour of the horrible revelation of their guilt, 
we would need no other commentary on the gos- 
pel. What is true in business life holds also in 
the political arena. ' How many have risen to 
flourish a little while like a green bay tree, and 
then go out forever in a cloud of dishonor? How 
many men, who have had for a time, apparently, 
great success in their immoral practices, have gone 
down suddenly into a night of shame and con- 
tempt ? 



148 THE GREAT PROBLEM. 

The world has enough pride, enough of the 
spirit of mammon, enough of the forgetfulness of 
the eternal righteousness. Would that I might 
sound a note every young business man might 
hear and heed. The world to-day needs men of 
unblemished integrity, men who are not ashamed 
to ask what is right and what is wrong ; men who 
place the kingdom of God first in all seeking. 

The Church needs positive business men to 
whom the gospel standard of integrity is absolute ; 
who will not substitute the morality of the mart 
for the law of the cross ; men who swear to their 
hurt, if need be, and change not ; to whom Jesus 
Christ is the final appeal in all questions of moral 
motive. We have plenty of men in the churches 
of weak-kneed integrity, feeble faith, blunted in 
conscience. On Sunday they are as straight as an 
arrow. On Monday they are gnarled and twisted 
and knotted. They bend like a Damascus blade. 
But there is no radical and abiding change of life 
in them. These men seem to lack the religious 
sense. They seize the forms. The Spirit they 
never knew. They stand like a man devoid of 
eyes and ears amid the richest creations of nature. 



THE GREAT PROBLEM. 149 

There is no beauty of sound or form for the blind 
and the deaf. Niagara may roar and the sun may 
kiss a thousand rainbows upon its silvery spray. 
They see and hear it not. But when eye and ear 
are opened, what a world of loveliness ! What 
eloquence may depict the rapture of the being 
who sees and hears for the first time ! 

Would that the spiritual eye might be opened 
to discern the majesty of truth, that the life might 
be arrayed in its beauty. The age needs positive 
convictions in the pulpit. See what a grand, posi- 
tive way nature has with her. Life rolls on cease- 
lessly over death, never stopping, never compro- 
mising. The pulpit must stop shilly-shallying 
and declare a positive religion and integrity that 
touches the common life ; ideals and possibilities 
for the soul life giving success here and blessed- 
ness hereafter. It has come to be a kind of re- 
proach when the minister brings the sublime doc- 
trine of the cross to the common necessities of 
life. " Yes, it is very good for a practical sermon" 
Of course not so sublime as those skylarkings 
amid the incomprehensible speculation of a sham 
theology, of which there is no hint in the doctrine 
of Him whom the people heard gladly. 



150 THE GREAT PROBLEM. 

The gospel declares the necessity of righteous- 
ness for the fulfillment of the highest destiny here 
and hereafter. The word of the Lord, repentance 
and remission of sins ; a holy life, the kingdom of 
God ; Christ in the soul, are not empty sounds, 
but enduring passports to prosperity and joy in 
time and in eternity. 

The kingdom of God is within you. God has 
given to each man a mission. Hence the call to 
individualism. Let each one be strong in himself, 
because God is with him. Men and women, the 
kingdom of God is at the threshold. Choose ye ! 
On all great moral and spiritual questions men 
are separating themselves. Some take the right, 
some the left. The North and the South were not 
more clearly divided in the great conflict than are 
the selfish and the unselfish, the virtuous and the 
vicious, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of 
the prince of this world. But every man must ap- 
pear before the judgment seat of Christ. It is ap- 
pointed unto man once to die, and after death the 
judgment. The time is coming when the trick- 
ster, the sharper, the cheat, the liar, the perjurer, 
the mean, the corrupter, the hypocrite, shall arise 



THE GREAT PROBLEM. 151 

to the declaration of that judgment they have pre- 
pared for themselves, and with shame and ever- 
lasting contempt written upon their faces slink 
away to hide themselves in the mantle of their 
own meanness. Christ deliver you and me from 
such a self. Let us heed the Master's warning 
entreaty : " Seek ye first the kingdom of God 
and His righteousness ;" and enjoy the fruition ol 
His promise : "All these things shall be added 
unto you." 



THE EVERLASTING. 



Above the passing dreams of man, 

God's thoughts run on in cloudless day ; 

The ages climb to reach their truth, 
And catch His everlasting yea. 

But the word of the Lord endureth forever. And this is the 
word yjhich by the Gospel is preached unto you* 

i Peter 1:25. 



VIII. 



THE EVERLASTING. 

A word is an utterance. It conveys a thought, 
a message. The Bible is God's word. It is His 
utterance, His thought, His message. 

Some one has said that the Bible contains " The 
word of man, the word of devil, the word of God." 
Yes ; all three are there. But God uses the word 
of man and the utterance of devil to barb the les- 
son, that He wants to teach humanity. And run- 
ning as a golden thread, making the wrath of man 
and devil praise Him through all its pages, and 
lending unity to its vast diversity, is the thought 
of God. The Fatherhood of Deity, the Sonship of 
man, love, grace and judgment mingle their 
Mosaic amid its tale of light and shadow, good and 
bad, the beautiful and ugly, sin and purity. 



156 THE EVERLASTING. 

The Bible is the book for the ages. Not for one 
race, or one age was it written, but for ail ages and 
all races. There was a time when men looked 
upon it as a sort of People's Encyclopedia, a com- 
pendium of universal knowledge. But more and 
more clearly the age is beginning to understand 
what the Bible really is. 

Its purpose is not that of the scientific treatise. 
If it had undertaken to reveal the absolute scien- 
tific truth, all ages but the last would have been 
skeptics about it. Only the people that dwelt in 
the noonday splendor of the most advanced scien- 
tific day could have comprehended and received its 
teachings. Then the Bible would have been re- 
ceived, but at the expense of all their generations. 

Although we may observe the unity of a living 
purpose in the various books of the Bible, we need 
not expect in it a literary symmetry. Men have 
no right to go to it as a universal text- book on all 
subjects of life, conduct and the relations of every- 
day existence upon this earth. Its aim is moral 
and religious. The revelation it contains shows 
man how to treat God and how to treat man. It 
is a guide to all moral and religious truth. 



THE EVERLASTING. 1 57 

But we must not expect to get out of the Bible 
what God has not put into it. Some try to see 
in it the compendium of all philosophy and all 
learning. I do not belittle the Bible when I say 
that its one purpose is to teach men religion. This 
it does, not by enunciating a set of rules or a code 
of action, Its declarations are principles. These 
are the forces that wind up and regulate human 
life. The key is a small affair. How insignifi- 
cant it is compared with the clock. Yet of what 
use is the clock unless the little key has wound it 
up and set it going. The great clock in the tower, 
with its mighty golden dial and dusky hands, 
w r ould be in poor business sneering at the rustic, 
insignificant key that hangs below. So that you 
need not tell me that the Bible is unimportant be- 
cause it only puts into a man's hand principles. 
The truth it reveals is for the government of his 
whole life, but he must apply the principles, and 
wind up his thoughts, desires and affections. The 
truth will thus mold his disposition, the bent, tone 
and temper of his mind. Where else will you look 
for that we call character ? 

But some men complain because the Bible does 



158 THE EVERLASTING. 

not do everything, and so condemn it. They find 
fault because seed is not plow, drill, planter, hoe, 
harvester, bread and all. Let the seed grow. 
Take care of it. Make the corn into bread. Then 
eat it if you want to know how good it is for food. 
But do not complain that the truth is not every- 
thing. Is not its work mighty enough ? 

Some try to see all politics, all creeds, all science 
and all methods in the Bible. Let us beware of 
abusing it. The Bible is not a treatise on geolo- 
gy or architecture. Do not complain because the 
ten commandments do not teach the art of naviga- 
tion. The spade for the ground, the telescope for 
the stars, the spectacles for the eyes, the boots for 
the feet, the cradle for the baby. Everything in 
its place. The truth of God's word is to develope 
the disposition, to mold the heart, to build the 
moral and spiritual character of man, and fit him 
for his true place before God and man. 

Again notice. The Bible gives all the truth 
man needs for the government of his moral and 
spiritual life. There are some things where the 
limit of discovery has been reached. While the 
world stands we may expect no new revelation 



THE EVERLASTING. 1 59 

regarding them. Such are certain mathematical 
truths. That two and three are five, is a fact for 
all eternity. No possible change in this universe, 
no manner of supposition could make two and 
three, four or six. Invention and discovery cease 
here at the one unalterable fact. The same is 
true of certain propositions in geometry. The 
human mind comprehends all there is in them. 

So the Bible has struck out a circle of moral 
and religious truths. It gives man all he needs to 
know, all there is about them. Nothing can su- 
persede the golden rule or the law of love. They 
are perfect. Nothing can be added to them, 
nothing taken away. So of many truths of reve- 
lation. They fit humanity. But they are seed 
truths. The light of truth falls upon human life. 
Walk in it. Do not be surprised or disheartened 
if it does not bring out into clear relief everything 
you would like to see and know. 

It is a lamp to the feet and a guide to the path. 
Some abuse and distrust the blessed Book, because 
it does not do more. 

One dark, stormy night when the wind blew 
almost a hurricane, I was out on the beach at 



160 THE EVERLASTING. 

Martha's Vineyard. Miles down the coast Cape 
Poge light house shed its radiance out into the 
wild night ; but that light did not reveal every- 
thing to the sailor, tossed and churned and shaken 
out there on the cruel sea. The gloom still hid 
the coves and bays, the hills crowned with foliage, 
the fishing hamlet, and gay watering place. But 
that light showed the mariner where he was, and 
which way to steer. The light did not take him 
up on its winged rays and set his tempest-tossed 
bark down in a snug harbor. It shone on him as 
he worked his own passage to the haven. 

How do I know it is God's word ? says the in- 
fidel. That it is good for the soul ? Prove it to 
me if you want me to believe it. Said a dear slave 
woman, as a skeptic sought to shake her faith, 
" Can you prove the sun is shining ? " " Of course 
I can," he answered. " It lights and warms me," 
" Just so," said the saint, ■• I know the Bible is 
God's Book, it lights and warms my soul." 

But if it is God's Book why did he not give it to 
everybody ? I do not believe it is God's Book, so 
many of our fellow beings are without its light. 
It is not so good for the soul as you say it is, or 
everybody would enjoy its benefactions. 



THE EVERLASTING. l6l 

But that argument goes on crutches. It boasts 
too much and then limps. You might prove in 
jast that way that no natural gift of God was good 
that he did not allow -to all the race. Oranges, 
apples and figs are not possessed by all men, so 
they are not good for any man. How absurd, you 
say. The Creator did not choose to take man into 
His counsels when he spread out the diversified 
map of the world and its life-sustaining products, 
nor did He ask man how He should save him. He 
has gone about it in His own way. And inscruta- 
ble are His counsels. 

Shall we refuse to drink of the waters of salva- 
tion until we understand the whys and wherefores 
that determined the glorious scheme of redemption? 
As well may the traveler, weary and perishing of 
thirst, refuse to drink of the crystal brook that 
crosses his path until he has first satisfied his 
mind about its source, its journeys, and its chem- 
ical composition. " He might die first," you ex- 
claim. 

Still further I remark what we get out of the 
Bible depends very largely on what we bring to it. 
If we come to it with the right spirit it is the book 



162 THE EVERLASTING. 

of blessings and spiritual nourishment. Never 
was the Scripture truth more forcibly illustrated, 
" Unto him that hath shall be given and from 
him that hath not shall be taken away even that 
which he seemeth to have," than just in this rela- 
tion. The saint of God, equipped with faith and 
prayer, lets down the buckets of spiritual desire 
into its wells of salvation, and brings them up 
brimming over with the water of life. It takes 
the sanctified mind and heart, molded with the 
touch of the renewing Spirit, to see its treasures 
and to appreciate its delicacies. The earth-bound 
vision sees not ; to the selfish tongue there is no 
taste in these things to make them desired. The 
dear old grandmother pours through her specta- 
cles upon its pages from her seat by the south 
window. What does she see ? Her face lights up 
as a cloud grows erubescent when kissed good 
night by the setting sun. 

The maid, blushing with pride as she glances in 
the mirror opposite, catches the glow on the saint's 
face, wonders what makes grandmother look so 
beautiful and happy. But to her, as she reads 
it, that same page reveals no secret that fires 



THE EVERLASTING. 163 

the heart and transfigures the face. Why is it ? 

The little lad at his mother's knees skims along 
the sentences of "The Lord's Prayer." Is in haste 
to have it over. Wonders a little, is bored a little, 
but gets done quickly. The sage, who has learned 
the language of the Spirit, ponders each sentence, 
lingers lovingly over it, and is never done in the 
profound thrill of his rapture. 

Let me say to you young men and maidens, get 
the spirit of the Bible, then you will understand 
it. It will not then be a narrow or dry or use- 
less book, but ripe with suggestion, impulse and 
inspiration for every hour of life. The Bible is no 
Scioto or Olentangy rivulets, whose shores are 
readily explored and from whose waters the fish 
are exhausted. No ! It is a Father of Waters, a 
boundless sea, the store-house of the globe, rich 
with the garnered treasures of the univeise. The 
mark of the Infinite Mind is upon it. All the 
ships that sail the seas cannot contain the draughts 
of fishes within its teeming floods. 

We need to get a comprehensive view of the 
Bible ere we condemn or approve it. God is a 
Man of War. He is a Judge, an Avenger, a 



164 THE EVERLASTING. 

Breaker, cry prophet and Psalmist. God is love,, 
sings John. From Genesis to Revelation breaks 
the love note. Billow follows billow. God is com- 
passionate, merciful, tender, long suffering. There 
is forgiveness with Him. Joy ! Joy ! If we 
tremble at the thunder of His voice, if we hide 
from the lightning of His eye, shall we not skip 
and be glad in the light of His smile ? 

O ! the Bible is like a beautiful country in its 
wide stretch and diversity of scenery. We may 
go down the valley, past cornfield after cornfield, 
with its tasseled splendor, while the ripening 
husks of the golden corn whisper and laugh to 
each other in the autumn glory. The farm lands 
are flat and uninteresting to you perhaps. There 
is no beauty in the farm house. But awake I 
arouse ! We have crossed the Ohio. We are 
booming along through the mountains of Western 
Virginia. Mountains pile around us, vistas of 
valley lands stretch away through notch and open- 
ing, as far as the eye can reach. Your attention 
is enlisted, your enthusiasm is enkindled now. 

So it is in the Bible. You may traverse a 
mighty plain in it and find but little to claim 



THE EVERLASTING. 1 65 

your attention. But here you come to a garden of 
roses. Groves of orange trees fling their blossoms 
and perfumes at your feet, and now the eye gazes 
enraptured down endless visions of immortal bless- 
edness. A boundless country ! There is no ex- 
hausting its beauty or interest. A Father's mes- 
sage warm with the heart's blood, leaps from its 
pages. There is something for you here, some- 
thing for me ; something to cling to ; to live by ; 
to die by. 

Well may the Christian sing : — 

" How precious is the book divine, 
By inspiration given ; 
Bright as a lamp its doctrines shine, 
To guide our souls to Heaven." 

Again I remark, we may go to the Bible and 
pluck its boughs of promise and flowers of hope. 
No sermon, no good book about the Bible can take 
its place. Its books are to be read as a whole, 
and not merely verse by verse. We need the im- 
pression that a whole gospel will make on the 
mind. Then will sentences fasten themselves and 
cling there. How many men have been kept from 
sin by a word from the good book leaping to the 
front. 



166 THE EVERLASTING. 

Yet men abuse the Bible by chopping it up into 
mere proof texts. An Apollo broken into bits 
might serve as missies for street boys to hurl at 
each other. Some look upon the Bible as a sort 
of stone yard furnishing weapons for intellectual 
knock downs. To some it is a vast and splendidly 
appointed arsenal, filled with grape, canister, 
cannon balls, booms, rockets and Greek fire. They 
take their peculiar notions and opinions to it, they 
put their own meaning into it, and marvelously 
enough their complacency is flattered. The Bible 
teaches just what they thought it did. They 
walk through it to pick up bludgeons for intellec- 
tual and doctrinal polemics. It was made, in their 
estimation, to furnish arguments against Unitar- 
ians, Universalists, Agnostics and Heretics. 
Other men have a theory and go to the Bible to 
prove it, like the man who invented a philoso- 
phy all his own, and studied the Bible in the orig- 
inal Greek to try and twist it to support his 
views. 

But the Bible is a Father's message, a legacy of 
life. The young man is to go to the Word of 
God as the pilot consults his compass, as the sea 



THE EVERLASTING. 167 

captain studies his chart, the barrister his law- 
books, the doctor his medical treatise. 

It is one thing to enlist the intellect and get its 
assent, another to be passionately absorbed heart 
and soul in an idea or project. The medical stu- 
dent looks at disease from afar. The professor's 
eyes, the elaborate text book, are his medium of 
vision. He believes his professor. His text book 
is his reliance. That medical book stands by him 
in his hour of peril. What the enthusiasm of his 
professor failed to do is accomplished now. His 
little son is sick. Death halts on the threshold. 
Will he come in? He wrestles with that book 
and those alarming symptoms. The book con- 
quers. What confidence he has in it ! What a 
different man he is at his next case. He has saved 
his own child. He can recommend that treatment 
heart and soul. He knows it will cure. His feet 
are on firm ground. He has tested that book. 
What it says on other diseases he has confidence 
in now. 

The Bible is your chart, help and guide ; your 
medical book. You do not feel well. There are 
indescribable twinges about you. Conscience is 



l68 THE EVERLASTING. 

smarting, seared as with a hot iron, the heart fails, 
the life is out of joint. Something is wrong. You 
want it cured. Go to the Bible. Reading it, 
studying it will not do. Practice what it teaches, 
do as it tells. That plague of serpents was a ter- 
rible visitation on those old Hebrews. Moses set 
lip the serpent of brass. What a thrill of joy must 
have electrified the first man who looked and was 
cured. See them leap up, and shout, and sing for 
joy. " Hallelujah! lam saved!" The word of 
God tells you just how to cure this malady of sin, 
how to be whole. The Bible is your chart. Each 
rock and reef and sunken danger is mapped out 
upon it. Launched on the high seas of life, the sails 
all shaken out, the compass of faith set, consult 
your chart. Your haven is down upon it. It tells 
you how to steer to reach it. Yes and more. It 
points to One who will pilot your bark amid fog 
and night and storm and danger. And your chart 
commands you take Him on board. 

That book is your guide. It must be obeyed on 
peril of your soul. 

Do you refuse to-day to give that Pilot the 
charge of your ship? Have you not read that 



THE EVERLASTING. 169 

now famous description from a masterpiece of 
English literature. A churlish, brutal captain 
was sailing his vessel up the English Channel. 
In his stupid stinginess he refused to pay for a 
pilot's services. How many such there are in this 
world. He could sail his own ship to her moor- 
ings. But the fog descended, the wind blew, the 
sails were filled. She seemed to glide along. But, 
ah ! the treacherous currents swept her backward 
and towards a dangerous shore. Night and a storm 
came down upon them, and the morning found a 
helpless wreck dashed to pieces in the raging 
waters. Lost ! lost ! lost ! 

So treacherous is the sea of life, so hard is it to 
make the haven, that every mariner must have a 
chart, a guide, a pilot, or in a night, an hour, dis- 
aster may impale the soul upon the jagged rocks 
where demons laugh their triumph over the 
wrecked spirit. 

Our text declares that the Infinite Father, whose 
hands are stretched out in benedictions in the 
everlasting Gospel, has written in the roll of the 
Book His maledictions against the stubborn, the 
hard-hearted and rebellious. O ! hear the voice 



170 THE EVERLASTING. 

of the Bible to-day. Consult your chart. Call the 
Pilot aboard. Be saved ! Be saved ! 

The Word endureth forever. Its predictions are 
true. God waits. He is not sleeping. Watch ! 
Be ready. Great^God ! Thou hast said it. Time 
shall end, and the feet of the Avenger shall stand 
upon the earth. 



CHRISTIAN UNITY 



Not one in outward form, or garb, 

But one in Spirit they, 
Who in the faith and love of Christ, 
Await the perfect day. 

All ye are brethren. Matt. xni:8. 

That they may be one as ice are one. John xviiiii. 



IX. 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

One of the noblest tendencies of religious aspir- 
ation is towards Christian Unity. This is no 
longer a dream, but a germinal reality. The tem- 
perature of inter-denominational life has been 
steadily rising for the last thirty years. Comity 
and fellowship are not names merely but they are 
facts. 

There is a life force in the Church whose evolu- 
tion points towards the fulfillment of the Redeem- 
er's prayer, " that they may be one, as we are 
one." 

The declaration of the Master concerning the 
Fatherhood of God and the divine brotherhood of 
man — God is your Father, all ye are brethren — 
the note to which every real pulse of the Church 
of Jesus vibrates. The watchmen on the watch- 



174 CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

towers seem to sound the trumpet at each yearly 
meeting of the Evangelical alliance. Man is. one 
in his divine kinship. Humanity is one in its 
needs and hopes. 

The subjects discussed in these world-famed 
meetings denote how zealously in this age the 
Church is preaching the simple Gospel in its wide 
application to the individual and to all social and 
civil reform. In the alliance of the divine brother- 
hood of man lies the real hope of the world's bet- 
terment. Notice, as an encouraging sign of the 
times, the nature of the subjects discussed at this 
last assembly. 

The hopeful results of parish visitation needs 
the methods ; Christian co-operation is awakening 
and directing the moral sentiment of the commu- 
nity ; Christian co-operation in relation to moral 
legislation, its enactment, its enforcement ; the 
need of permeating our civilization w r ith the spirit 
of Christ ; Christianity and the state ; enlisting 
the laity ; the need of an enthusiasm for humanity 
on the part of the Churches. Under the inspira- 
tion of such themes as these Christians of all 
creeds felt the force of the Master's utterance, 
" All ye are brethren." 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. 1 75 

The tendency of the age is to unity in this 
divine brotherhood. The life force of the Church 
points toward its fulfillment. The influence of 
this inspiration has produced marvels in the way 
of sympathy, catholicity, charity, counsel and 
actual plans for the advancement of the Redeem- 
er's kingdom. Dogmatic theology has not under- 
gone a greater change than has swept over the 
Church in this particular. Even ecclesiastical op- 
position to the swelling tide of union and good 
fellowship is not only inconsistent, but ineffectual. 
Strife is of the past. When the creed of the 
Church is all anathema, the history of the Church 
will be all war. A dying Scotchman left his care- 
fully written protest one hundred years ago against 
" sectarian errors and blasphemies." He included 
among them the teachings of Richard Baxter, the 
saint ; George Whitfield, God's eloquent evangel- 
ist, and Luther, w 7 hose iconoclasm was offset by 
his intuitive constructive faculties. Isolation is 
no longer possible. Churches are coming closer 
together in the drift toward contact, community, 
fellowship. We have learned to distinguish prin- 
ciples from methods, spirit from letter. 



176 CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

There is also a growing sentiment that unity is 
not liturgical uniformity. The argument for 
unity on the basis of the Book of Common Prayer is 
the product of bungling doctors, and is neither 
scientific, logical or according to common sense. 
It would be as good botany to classify trees from 
the appearance of bark alone as to attempt to seek 
the unification of Christians from the appearance 
of their liturgical bark alone. What we want is 
neither concession nor compromise, but the Chris- 
tian liberty to revolve in the orbit of principle. 
The one law is the gravitation that binds to Christ, 
the living center. When we seek facts and prin- 
ciples we are quit of local coloring and distortions 
and tend to catholicity. Modes, methods, opin- 
ions, forms dissolve. What was once an occasion 
of rancor or ghostly fear is now found to be some- 
thing less than a shadow. 

Atrophy seizes upon differences and whole con- 
tinents of common faith, common practice, com- 
mon work for the needs of men, the salvation of 
races and the regeneration and elevation of 
humanity stretch away into the illimitable ocean 
of divine love. Oneness of spirit, visions of con- 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. 1 77 

quest saturate the soul, until the appetite for the 
little beds of denominational parsnips and onions 
shrinks into microscopic smallness. How long 
shall divisions be perpetuated on the letter of 
baptismal modes, apostolic succession (if anybody 
can tell just what that bugaboo is), ordination by 
bishop or presbyter, singing psalms, playing or- 
gans or not playing organs ? 

How long shall two great bodies of Christians 
remain apart on the color of the pigment in the 
epidermis ? 

Move on eager flood-tide of ecclesiastical his- 
tory ! Drown with thy mighty waters the Pharoahs 
of caste that have held in traditional bondage the 
people ok the Lord, compelling them to make 
bricks for the world spirit of the Egyptians, rather 
than to conquer the Philistines and partake of 
milk and honey in the land of promise beneath the 
vine and fig tree of love and universal fellowship. 

The nebulous period of comity and conference 
is giving way to something better. This is the 
age of co-operation. 

It is causing to vibrate to its mighty spirit all 
departments of human enterprise. 



178 CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

That our real need is an intelligent and actual 
basis of co-operation, those who have thought 
carefully upon the question attest. That comity 
is not enough its loose-jointed, moilusca-like rela- 
tionships clearly prove. It must be something 
definite; that which has a vertebra around which 
to build the temple of common interests, hopes 
and developments, 

Unity must stand on the rock of vital facts. It 
should be real in the nature of things, not a sub- 
stitution of measures or expediencies for princi- 
ples. Minor matters resolve themselves. Chris- 
tian unity carries in itself the process of differ- 
entiation and elimination. 

Ecclesiastical stupidity alone clogs the mills and 
grinds its teeth on cobble stones. Provincial is- 
sues upholding sects tend to disappear by natural 
disintegration. Sectarian cohesion is secured only 
by the application of dogmatic glue and ecclesias- 
tical plaster, warranted to keep together " our 
identity " and smuggle closely ancient animosi- 
ties and local strifes. What w r e point to is a basis 
for work. 

If I remember, it was Macaulay w r ho wrote, 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. 1 79 

" Where heathen men unite to worship a cow, 
Christian men should unite to preach Christ." 
And this conviction is obtaining universal sweep 
in the evangelical Churches of the world. The 
tendency to union in the Japanese Churches is 
bound to override the prejudices of the Presby- 
terian and the narrow conceits of the Congrega- 
tionalist. 

Christian conference has done much toward 
formulating active plans of work. The Church 
can not touch elbows without something good 
coming out of such fellowship. Parish visitation 
by men and women, under the auspices of our 
Churches, is a great wedge, breaking asunder bar- 
riers of ignorance and manacles of bigotry. 

When Christians of all stripes get together, vis- 
iting people of their neighborhood, from house to 
house, something must give way. These co-ordi- 
nate lines of Christian work make some people 
feel, for the first time, that they hold a common 
faith with the Church over the way, or around the 
corner. The poor man and woman, on whom the 
burden of mere existence rests so heavily, has a 
dawning perception that the gospel means human 



l8o CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

sympathy, heart, kindly interest in one another. 
U A11 ye are brethren. " 

Two things, at least, are accomplished : undis- 
covered realms of similarity and agreement loom 
in view ; the unchurched masses begin to yearn, 
unconsciously, for the fellowship of the Church, 
through new knowledge of its message and atti- 
tude. 

A lady writes me from New England : " In the 
divisions of the evangelical alliance visitation 
committee, our Mary's work fell in the company 
of the Methodists. Well, you know how she just 
hates those shouting Methodists. But she took, 
up the work. Now, you would shake with laugh- 
ter to hear how she raves over her associates of 
that denomination. She says : c They are just 
the nicest Christian people.' Why hadn't she 
known it before?" Because a high hedge had 
been set up by prejudice and bigotry. So, in more 
ways than one, co-operation among Christian folk 
is bearing fruit. 

" Is that the kind of Christianity you have down 
at your Church?" said an unfortunate, but worthy, 
workingman, whom severe illness had stranded, 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. l8l 

financially, when a certain deacon handed his wife 
a bank-note, with the remark : " We are all broth- 
ers in the Lord, you know, and that's to pay the ' 
rent, and something besides. " " We are brothers 
in the Lord, you know," will work wonders in the 
line of practical effort for the w r eary world. We 
have had preaching of a certain kind long enough, 
but the masses have discovered, and the pulpit is 
beginning to rub its sleepy eyes to the fact that 
"fine words butter no parsnips. " Let us have a 
little more butter on the parsnips, and fewer fine 
quotations with the juice rung out of them, for 
the laudable purpose of rhetorical effect. 

If the mission enterprises of the Church are to 
succeed abroad, and in the great centres of popu- 
lation in this land, it must come about through 
practical plans of Christian union and organized 
effort of all denominations of the faith. This is true 
of the evangelization of the masses of our great 
cities. Let us confine our attention to this prob- 
lem alone. The history of the city is the history 
of humanity. 

America runs to great cities. The tendency, 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is to gravitate to 



l82 CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

them. The census shows that, in the last quarter 
of a century, they have gained enormously on the 
body politic. The city has captured wealth, pow- 
er, influence, to the detriment of the rural districts. 
The ratio of increase in population, notwithstand- 
ing the vast areas of this country, is on the side 
of the city, by twenty-two and one-half per cent. 
Says an enthusiastic statistician, " By 1890 one- 
fourth of our population will be in cities. " Many 
rural districts in New England and New York are 
decreasing in population and wealth. The school- 
house and the church are actually dying out. 

From 1790 to 1880 the entire population in- 
creased thirteen times, but that of the city eighty- 
six times. In 1800 there were only six cities over 
eight thousand ; in 1880 two hundred and eighty- 
six. 

"What does this mean?" we may ask. Just 
this : It means that our population — on account 
of these conditions — is just &o much the more 
easily made the prey of corrupting and degenerat- 
ing influences morally, politically, socially and 
commercially. 

The existing foes of our institutions can pursue 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. 183 

their disintegrating and demoralizing schemes to 
the greater advantage. The Roman Catholic 
church, which opposes its vast and completely 
equipped system to our common school system, 
has a proportionately better opportunity to wage a 
successful warfare than when wealth, intelligence 
and population were more widely diffused. Every 
form of vice and every force that threatens the 
public security, or menaces our institutions, thrives 
in the putrid and pestilential air of our big cities. 

A careful study of the compendium of the last 
census, with some calculation, reveals that " a lit- 
tle more than one-third of our entire population 
is foreign-born, or of foreign parentage. Yet Dr. 
Strong says sixty-two per cent, of the population 
of Cincinnati is foreign, sixty-three per cent, of 
Boston, eighty-three per cent, of Cleveland, eighty- 
eight per cent, of New York, ninety-one per cent, 
of Chicago." 

The danger from this condition of things is two- 
fold — the false ideas that are imported with the 
immigrants and the hostile feelings that are creat- 
ed for baneful purposes against our institutions 
and religion even as soon as the newcomer sets 



184 CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

foot in Castle Garden. This is particularly true of 
our German population. Vast bodies of them are 
ignorant of the real spirit of our institutions ; they 
mistake license for liberty and appear as putrify- 
ing sores on the body politic, spreading contagion. 
I may be allowed to say this, for I am a combina- 
tion Dutch and Yankee myself. 

Now what relation has the church to the growth 
of cities ? 

There are two startling facts that meet us in the 
study of the problem of the cities. The poor do 
not have the Gospel preached to them, and they 
do not care to have it. The demand upon the 
Church to preach it, is all the greater for their in- 
difference, and we do not settle or get around the 
question by saying that they can come and hear if 
they want to. The rich can afford churches, can 
pay for music, preaching and aesthetic religious 
surroundings. The poor can not. The wealthy 
Christians have laid upon them the imperative 
duty to solve the problem of how the Gospel may 
be preached to the poor of our time. Christianity, 
which was once very attractive to the poor, as 
proclaimed by Christ and His apostles, is not at- 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. 1 85 

tractive to them to-day, as represented by the 
modern type of Church. It is rather repellant. 
It drives them to the dumps, and despair, rather 
than to hope. 

The burden of solving the problem of how shall 
the masses be reached lies upon the Church. The 
New Testament furnishes the purest ethics for the 
preaching of morals, by the Christian minister. 
It neither denies nor belittles natural morality. 
It has its own standards of right and wrong,w^hich 
are not at all appreciated by the unchristian world. 
As a step to the solution of this problem, it affords 
a matchless morality. When the sovereignty of 
ethics is denied, enthusiasm dies, and prudence is 
enthroned. But prudence can not save the w r orld. 
In the trenchant words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
" Its arms are too short. Cordage and machinery 
never supply the place of life. Man does not live 
by bread alone, but by faith, by admiration, by 
sympathy." Let us add, by every word of God. 

The New Testament recognizes government and 
counsels obedience to it, and insists upon all vir- 
tues that make good citizens. It contains no rules 
or ordinances for politics, or society. Not a pre- 



1 86 CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

cept is given on this plane, but it goes down to the 
foundation of moral and civil obligation. It rests 
the whole thing there. 

These principles of Christianity are to be appli- 
ed to the advancing needs and changing problems 
of sociology. Just here I observe a lurking dan- 
ger of our times. 

The man who studies Christianity does not 
study the society and complex relationships to 
which it is to be applied ; and the man who studies 
the phenomena of society doesn't study Chris- 
tianity. The Gospel in its phalanx of principle is 
capable of solving every difficulty that con- 
fronts the world, if men will only trust it and go 
ahead. 

Again, Christianity supplies the motive and the 
enthusiasm for dealing with the peculiar phases 
of our enormous city populations. The religion 
of Christ has changed the thought and feeling of 
the world by exalting its passive virtues and ideals 
above the fleshly and earth-born ideas that domin- 
ated the old-time civilizations. 

The cross, the emblem of glorified suffering and 
self-sacrifice, enshrines for humanity the virtues of 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. 1 87 

religious heroism. The genius and force of Chris- 
tianity are in the incarnate Christ, 

u The chief among ten thousand and altogether lovely." 

Supreme character is the reflex of His teachings 
and example — of Himself. Its motives are cen- 
tred in the thought of God and the heart of God 
displayed in saving grace. " The love of Christ 
constraineth us ; because we thus judge that He 
died for all, that they which live should no longer 
live unto themselves, but unto Him who for their 
sakes died and rose again. " 

Religion, patriotism and humanity alike urge 
the conversion of the semi-heathen masses of these 
great cities to the principles and spirit of the Gos- 
pel. But it must be confessed that the Church 
has lamentably failed here. The mission chapel, 
manned by mediocrity, has been an abortion. A 
caricature of architecture, and dismally pious 
enough, generally, to satisfy Satan himself, it has 
called forth again and again the query : 

O Lord, and shall it ever live 
At this poor dying rate ? 

It is contrary to the simplicity of Christ and the 
communal spirit of the Gospel. As an institution 



l88 CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

-within the Christian Church its tendency is to 
perpetuate caste. Fine churches for the rich and 
^well to do, but for those who have to wear garments 
that smell from necessity somewhat of the odors 
of the kitchen, let the inferior clap-boarded and 
rough-plastered structure suffice. The New Tes- 
tament teaches brotherhood, that the strong 
should help the weak, the rich the poor. Very 
poor people can appreciate fine churches and 
works of art and be educated and refined thereby, 
:as well as others. This custom of Protestantism 
is dissonant to the temper of American civilization. 
We proclaim brotherhood and then spend our en- 
ergies in building and perpetuating cast-iron bar- 
riers between the classes. But in the disintegrat- 
ed state of Protestantism which has prevailed, we 
may hope for nothing better. 

No one denomination or sect is strong enough, 
or has enough of the grace of God, to carry on the 
work of city evangelization as it should be done. 
The well-to-do people move away from certain 
sections of the city, and naturally, inevitably, they 
take their churches with them. For the modern 
Church is but another form of mercantile club. 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. 189 

You pay your money and you get your choice. 
Hence, as a result, the mission chapel is a feeble 
attempt at an oasis in the desert of city life. The 
rich are ashamed of it and the poor despise it. 
The whole conception is to-day malodorous. 

Now I know that a strong argument may be of- 
fered to the effect that Christianity when accepted 
makes folks well off and comfortable, even in this 
world. And that is one reason for this state oi 
things — a single factor in the problem. 

But it adds a dynamite argument on the side of 
a better kind of city evangelization. As left to 
denominational enterprise, it is a woeful failure. 

Have we not right here a real and intelligent 
basis or co-operation and Church unity — a union 
of mind, heart and hand born of a single purpose ? 
Let differences vanish before the greatness of the 
danger confronted. Let principles and essentials 
find exaltation. 

What we need is the sowing of the Gospel seed 
among these masses, to put such work on a 
broader, higher, better foundation. But ere it can 
be begun, our Churches as denominations, must 
rise above the commercial greed and heathenish 



190 CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

love of place, and wealth, and power that is now 
cursing them. Christ, and not Church polity or 
ecclesiasticism, must be supreme. Let evangeli- 
cal Christianity unite in every state and city to do 
this work. Build a great mission-house in the 
quarter where it is needed. Let the church be as 
imposing in architecture and adornment as any 
church edifice in the city; let the establishment 
include all that is calculated to win, elevate, help 
and save men. Remembering that the conduct of 
life has so large a place in the New Testament, 
let the lowly and suffering sons of men realize 
that the Church, in Christ's name, is there to heal 
the hurt of both the body and the soul, for time 
and eternity. 

Proclaim the cross and the brotherhood of men, 
not as a theory, but in reality. Put the best and 
brightest men right there with bands of co-work- 
ers — the Spurgeons, the John Halls, the Talmages. 
This work demands the best talent ; not the 
mediocrity so often given it. 

The city Evangelical alliance is only one step 
forward in this good work. Dividing cities into 
parishes is well. Saying that an abler class of 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. 191 

ministers must be assigned to work in neglected 
quarters of the city is well. But I only wish to 
give a mere hint at this Christmas season, under 
the banner of the Prince of Peace, who says him- 
self : " All ye are brethren." 

Ye who have no patience with the lowly Christ, 
and who at this advent time are absorbed in burning 
incense on the altar of self, or presenting gold and 
silver and precious gems to the idols of pride and 
sentiment, though ye label them " Christmas pres- 
ents " — which they are not, for 'they are not even 
given in His name — this will have no interest for 
you. 

Let a congress be established which shall have 
the control of this department of Christian work. 
Give it the needed power and the needed treasury. 
Sink the denominations in it for this purpose. 
Such Churches of Christ will be recruiting 
stations for the denominational Churches in 
the better quarters of the community. When 
Protestantism presents a bold and united front to 
this great problem of evangelization, w T ill the 
Church regain the respect it has lost in some 
quarters and the cross be exalted over the lives of 



192 CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

the city. Then will the Christmas chimes find 
sweet echoes where now is only misery, crime and 
blasphemy. Then will the advent of the Christ 
child bring afresh his glorified humanity into 
many a dark alley and lonely tenement-house and 
gladden weary hearts with a new sense of the 
divine brotherhood of man. 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 



One hand the universe controls, 

And source of life is He, 
Bound whom, in sweetest music, rolls 

Creation's unity. 

The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Al- 
mighty hath given me life. 

Job xxxnitz}.. 



X. 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

There are two theories as to the origin of man. 
The one makes him the result of a mechanical 
process, the other the product of a direct creation. 
One has forced him up by evolution, by the other 
he came down fresh from the Divine Creator. 

But whether the Hand Divine, to whom one day 
is as a thousand years, a thousand years as one 
day, has worked by the unveiling of a slow pro- 
cess, or in any other particular method, it matters 
not, the devout scientist and practical observer 
may humbly say, " God did it." We may readily 
accept that idea of evolution which makes it co- 
existent and co-extensive w r ith the Providence of 
the Creator. If we should dare seek for a defini- 
tion of it, perhaps, we might reach, no better than 



196 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

to describe it as that process by which present di- 
versity has been reached in nature by progression, 
whereby the more complex and higher forms have 
proceeded from simpler and lower forms. 

It seems probable that there has been such a 
differentiation as this. But beyond this science is 
not at present able to go. And here there is no 
place for merely materialistic or agnostic hypothe- 
ses. There is no accounting for the introduction 
of life and the beginning of the world and the 
origin of man upon it, by any other evolution than 
that which has back of it the living, acting, per- 
sonal God. It is a creation. 

Such an evolution differs not essentially from 
that which we call Providence. 

For we mark in the products of science, that it 
can trace up to the beginnings of life, but it has 
no real notion of what life is, or power to produce 
life, or ability to account for it. 

There is a point at which religion and Christian- 
ity step in and supplement the sublime revela- 
tions of science with their own sublimer teach- 
ings. With its most persistent gaze science has 
looked at the phenomena of origins, but from its 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 197 

depths it has brought up only mute mystery. 
Says a leading scientific thinker, " The atheist 
tells us there is nothing there, we cannot believe 
him. We cannot tell what it is, but there is 
certainly something." 

I stood, the other day, before Muncacksy's great 
painting, " Christ before Pilate. " The grandeur 
of the picture is not in coloring, not in excellent 
drawing, not in the poise of figure. Its informing 
power, breathing vitality, thought, meaning — is 
soul. It lives in its burning thought. 

Humanity's existence is God's thought. What 
is the difference between a man and yonder tree, 
statue, or painting ? The brightness of the sun 
but veils the majesty of heaven's eternal King. 
But man is above the sun in majesty and glory. 
His power is in his life. The creative might of 
God, in the evolutions of the divine thought, 
breathed upon man, and he became a living soul. 
Man lives, thinks, feels, acts. 

Drummond says : " Watch a careful worker in 
the laboratory of science, and see how nearly a 
man, by searching has found out God." The ob- 
server is none other than Huxley. He stands and 



198 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

looks down the tube of a powerful microscope. 
He reports what he sees. He tells us that he has 
placed upon the glass a tiny speck of matter, which 
is the egg of a little water animal, called the water 
newt, or salamander. He is trying to tell what he 
sees. It is the creation, or development of life. The 
great observer has described for us, in his lay 
sermons, what passes under his eye. I select a 
brief passage. 

" It is a minute spheroid, " he says, " in which 
the best microscope will reveal nothing but a 
structureless sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding 
granules in suspension. But strange possibilities 
lie dormant in that semi-fluid globe. Let a mod- 
erate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, 
and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, 
and yet so steady and purposelike in their succes- 
sion, that one can only compare them to those op- 
erated by a skilled modeler upon a formless lump 
of clay. As with an invisible trowel the mass is 
divided and sub-divided into smaller and smaller 
portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of 
granules not too large to build withal the finest 
fabrics of the nascent organism. And then it is 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 199 

as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be oc- 
cupied by the spinal column, and molded the 
contour of the body ; pinching up the head at one 
end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and 
limb into due salamandrine proportions in so ar- 
tistic a way, that, after watching the process hour 
by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed by 
the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than 
an achromatic, would show the hidden artist with 
his plan before him, striving with skillful manipu- 
lation to perfect his work" 

" So near," exclaims the devoted thinker, " has 
man by searching come to the Creator. So near 
to the vision of God." 

Now what does the Bible say of man's origin. 
In the beginning God created the world. I go 
back to man's ancestral lineage. I find that for five 
of those days of creation God was busy in fitting 
up an abode for his son. 

How boundless the fair palace his fingers erect- 
ed. He spread the floor below of sheeny blue and 
living green. He lifted the invisible pillars to 
support the vaulted dome of cerulean hue. He it 
was, who, by creative might, adorned and beautifi- 



200 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

ed, and fitted the sumptuous palace for the abode 
of him who was to come after. Then, when the 
house was ready, comes the final act. In the be- 
ginning, when light was needed, The Lofty Being 
who inhabiteth the earth had said : " Let there be 
light, and there was light. " 

When the floor of ocean was to be flooded, or 
the earth peopled, He, in his infinite majesty had 
simply said : " Let them be," and lo ! they were. 
But now man is to be formed, and the Infinite 
Creator pauses. He takes counsel with himself. 
What shall he be like ? " And God said, let us 
make man in our image, after our likeness. 
So God created man in his own image. And the 
Lord God formed man from the dust of the 
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath 
of life and man became a living soul." Life ! no 
physicist has defined, — no medical genius been 
able to lay hands on it and say : " Here it is ! this 
is life." Man is no longer a model, no longer a 
beautiful statue, but a living, breathing, thinking 
being. Man instinct with the " nephesh " begins 
his career upon the earth ; the Hebrew word 
means, first the breath, the breath of life, then 



THE ORIGIN OF UFE. 201 

that by which we call the principle of life, the 
spirit, the anima, the soul, the real man. 

I do not propose to spend the time in discuss- 
ing the nature of this spirit. Let those who have 
the time, and think themselves wise, do that. Let 
me, the rather, point out as important, the source 
of man's life. His heritage, and talents. His rev- 
enues, and the ways that exist for the expenditure 
of the force inherent in man's nature. There are 
obligations and opportunities of service, the strik- 
ing out of a career. In a word the essentials of man- 
hood. Considering our environment, it behooves 
us to make the most of the life we have. If there 
are higher inspirations let us seize them. If re- 
ligion offers loftier possibilities to the soul, than 
the animal may know, let us develope them, for 
the evolution of the noblest manhood and woman- 
hood. 

Some of you iiere to-night are to deal, constant- 
ly, with the means and methods that secure the 
preservation and development of the physical life, 
and in your observations, the spiritual must not 
pass by unheeded. 

Let us recognize the truth, that the importance 



202 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

of life is enhanced by its origin. God made man. 
Look at the mystery of the physical life. Think 
of its wondrous adaptations. 'What a profound 
mystery the birth of a single babe. A life, a soul, 
endless possibilities. A glint of immortality, 
smothered in soft quivering flesh. 

Listen to England's bard sing, as he catches a 
glimpse of the pink and white of the cradle, and 
dreams of its meaning : 

u The soul that rises in us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar." 

The soul is not simply a name without reality. 
Man is nothing il not immortal. Because of his 
immortality, the earthly life is worth living. Rob 
him of that, you take away his chief prop, his 
greatest inspiration, and motive for sublime living. 
If there is no immortality, nature, instinct, hope, 
the yearning passion of the human heart, the 
glimpses of Godlike nobility, caught here and 
there in human character, all the universe, is a 
tremendous fraud, a cheat, a phantasmagoria,where 
all the promise of expectation knows no fulfillment, 
and the flower is but an awful mockery of a har- 
vest never to be. v 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 203 

The Scandanavians have a very impressive alle- 
gory of life. It runs somewhat in this way. They 
call it a tree, " The Igdrasil," or tree of life, of ex- 
istence. The roots of the tree grow deep in the 
soil of mystery ; the trunk reaches above the 
clouds ; the branches circle the globe v At the 
foot of it sit the Past, the Present, and the Future, 
watering the roots. Its boughs, in their unleafing 
spread out through all lands and all times. Every 
leaf of the tree is a biography, every fibre a deed, 
a thought, a word. The fruit which it bears is 
the history of the nations. It rustles with the 
noise of human existence. It grows amid the howl 
of the hurricane. It is the great tree of humanity. 

We see here how the half savage Norseman esti- 
mated human life. To him it was a sublime 
and momentous thing, to live ! to feel ! to think ! 
to be ! God made it ! God made it ! Shall our es- 
timate be lower than this ? No ! 

We will cry out with the author of u In Memoriam": 

" Life is not as idle ore. 
But iron dug from central gloom. 
And heated hot with burning fears, 
And dipt in baths of hissing tears, 
And battered with the shocks of doom 
To shape and use." 



204 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

The marvellous power and importance of human 
life is seen in its capacity for service. Its reve- 
nues are vast. The expectations reposed in it are 
vast also. Where much is given, much may be 
demanded. 

Considering its origin, what is the purpose of 
man's life ? You answer, " To glorify God." True. 
But what do you mean by that? The glory of 
God is His goodness. In doing good is His high- 
est satisfaction. Man advances the Creator's glory 
by his service, not to God directly, but to man. 
He serves God in serving humanity. Christ's life, 
Paul's life, the lives of all the truly good have 
been crowned by the self-renouucement of service 
for human good. 

The end of great capacity is not simply in pos- 
session. Before any superior endowment stretch 
long avenues of service. " A complete and gener- 
ous education," says John Milton, " is that which 
fits a man to perform justly, skillfully and mag- 
nanimously all offices, both public and private, of 
peace and war." 

Does man's power consist lastly and only in the 
fact that he lives ? So does the monkey, the tiger, 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 205 

the hog. Not in that fact alone, you say, but in 
this, that with the life man possesses are resi- 
dent higher faculties. 

The secret of his power, is not in the will, the 
intellect, but in those susceptibilities through 
which speak the moral and spiritual nature. After 
all is said and done, not energy, industry, or com- 
mercial faculty, but moral and spiritual power, in 
England's and America's civilization, has made 
the mother country and her offspring great. It is 
the moral purpose of the Anglo-Saxon that has 
really conquered the world. 

What makes a deed great and heroic? The 
mere fact that a man or woman did this or that ? 
It is the moral or spiritual purpose with which it 
is done. 

A woman killed a man with a shot-gun — it was 
foul murder. The world shudders in horror at 
the deed. Not but that many men deserve to be 
cut down with a shot-gun in a woman's hand. 

The mother who defended her babes from the 
assaults of wild Indians in the wilderness of Amer- 
ica, one hundred years ago, is celebrated in song 
and story as a heroine. She, too, killed a man 



205 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

with a shot-gun. No one called her a murderer. 
The difference often between the criminal and the 
hero lies in the motive. 

So divine is the origin of life, how careful we 
should be to use it well. Its powers and revenues 
demand that we make the best of it. Men are 
moved and impelled to activity by various con- 
trolling motives. The love of family, the love of 
ambition, the love of power for it's own sake, give 
a kind of unity and swing to earthly careers. But 
if men could find a central force out of which all 
springs, and into which all returns, would not this 
be a supreme cause of activity, and lend the charm 
of a living unity to all these mere fragments of 
existence ? 

Does not the origin of life foreshadow such a 
cause ? Is not the love of Christ, the love of God, 
and all He represents in the incarnation, such a 
master motive. Loving Him as the central force 
of all conduct, will not all other loves spring from 
this and dissolve into it as the central force of the 
moral and spiritual universe, as in nature elec- 
tricity dissolves into light, heat, and motion, and 
absorbs them all again into its mysterious bosom ? 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 207 

How all the changing fragments of life would take 
on the quenchless attributes of this all pervading 
force ! 

" Ye shall receive power," said the Master. The 
power of the Holy Spirit. The love of the high- 
est overshadowing and permeating the lower life. 
This gives direction and force to individual char- 
acter. Is not this exalted guidance for all the pil- 
grimage of time? 

Young men, I speak to you, here is the en- 
thronement of the moral and spiritual faculty, 
with which the immortal soul came into the world, 
" Trailing clouds of glory, from God, who is our 
home." 

He who sets out in life simply to live easily, 
will find sooner or later that life bears hard upon 
him. It is the old story that a woman, chastened 
and even embittered by experience, tells unto a 
younger one, in the words of a popular author of 
stories, with a moral attached : " There was a 
man to whom I was very near so that I could see 
a great deal of his life, who made almost everyone 
fond of him, for he was young, clever, and beauti- 
ful, and his manners to all were gentle and kind. 



208 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

I believe that when I first knew him, he never 
thought of anything cruel or base. But because 
he tried to slip away from everything that was un- 
pleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as 
for his own safety, he came at last to commit some 
of the basest of deeds, such as make men infamous. 
He denied his father and left him to misery; 
he betrayed every trust that was reposed in him, 
that he might keep himself safe and get rich and 
prosperous. Yet calamity overtook him." 

What dignity clothes even the body ? It is the 
temple of the soul. The house should be pre- 
served, adorned, cared for. If great labor is ex- 
pended upon the casket, it is that it may be a 
fitting abode for the priceless jewel. 

The soul should be well housed for the 
growth and divine tasks made possible for it. 

Your life is within the limitations of will, ca- 
pacity, and environment. What do you propose to 
do with your life ? 

There is the possibility of its foolish waste. On 
the other hand the opportunity for use in highest 
service. 

All the bright possibilities of the dawn, the 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 209 

dewy freshness, the divine capacity and glorious 
expectations will meet you after many days, to 
ask, What have you done with us ? Why have 
you treated us thus ? 

There is an old French picture wherein the ar- 
tist has represented a man and woman wandering 
in the depths of an ancient forest. The expres- 
sion on their faces are in keeping with their weird 
gloomy surroundings. Out of the dusk of the 
cloistered forest aisles they see advancing towards 
them a youth and maid. He, radiant and hopeful; 
she, fair and fresh. The dewy cheek, the bright 
eye, the noble aspiration, the exalted purpose — all 
bespeak marvellous possibilities and assured vic- 
tory. But somehow there is something familiar 
to the aged couple in the bright eye, the buoyant 
step, and self-reliant mein of those happy young 
people, and as they gaze, they are suddenly star- 
tled with the revelation that the graceful youths 
are but the shadows of their former selves, loom- 
ing from the darkness of the old forest. 

But haggard and forlorn, the bright vision of 
the morning only increases their present mis- 
ery, and they cry out in despair. 



2IO THE ORIGIN OF LIFE. 

Some day the vision of our beautiful youth 
with its pure and breezy expectation must greet 
us, either in the tangled depths of defeat, wretch- 
edness and despair — a. trio nursed and fostered by 
ourselves — -or on the uplands won by earnest 
striving, where the western sky shall flush our 
faces with a light, whose evening shining is a 
prophecy of brighter and still brighter days to be. 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH 



For faith is lost in this hard age, 
When keen scapel and crucible, 
And microscope and science's page 
Beligion's earlier dream dispel. 

Yet, still the heart, with giant hope, 

Will reach beyond this age of doubt, 
And see a holier horoscope, 
For scarecrows of a frantic route. 

This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith, 

i John v:^. 



XI. 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 

These are the words of a poet and a mystic. 
Are we to consider them as a flight of the imagin- 
ation, or as sober reality ? Does the Apostle ex- 
pect us to believe that so intangible a force as 
faith can triumph over the omnipresent, concrete 
world ? To the superficial eye, this is only pleas- 
ant poetry, not the utterance of soberness and 
truth. 

Yet a closer study reveals the intense earnest- 
ness of the Apostle. He means what he says. 

The more we think upon it, the more John's 
thought seems to accord with other Scripture ut- 
terance. 

This is the age of the commentary, none ever 
more so. The Bible student has fallen into the 



214 THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 

habit of neglecting the strong support of the 
Word, for human crutches, asking what does Cal- 
vin say, or Matthew Henry, or Barnes, or Myers ? 
The great question is, What does the Bible say ? 
The very best commentary on the Word is the 
Word itself. Compare Scripture with Scripture, if 
you want light upon its inner meaning, and let the 
Holy Spirit illumine its Holy of Holies. 

In the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, Paul gives 
us a definition of faith. He says : " Faith is the 
substance of things hoped for ; the evidence of 
things not seen." The Pauline idea of faith will 
help us to understand John's conception of the 
power of faith. 

First, faith is that which is the foundation of all 
hope ; it is ground work on which to build. It is 
the root, pith, fibre of the structure or being con- 
cerning which we entertain expectation. 

Faith is that power which inspires in the soul 
the expectation that the dim projects of the pres- 
ent shall find their consummation in the living 
realities of the future. Faith tarries not behind 
the swift chariot of hope, but impels the eager 
gaze to behold through the misty vistas of the un- 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 215 

certain, the rosy garments of the actual and the 
attained. It sees down the dreary labyrinth of 
years, the Golden Gate issuing to quiet and repose 
for the restless tossing and the weary wandering 
of the now. 

Then rising to the realm of the religious and 
spiritual, across the sea of time, it beholds the 
city of the soul's desired rest bathed in the glory 
streaming from the throne of God. 

One thing we may notice at the outset, the ex- 
hibition of faith is not confined to the religious 
life. It lies at the base of all progress in the ma- 
terial world. In the things of time and sense it 
is the ground work of hope, hence of activity and 
achievement. So in sober truthfulness " faith is 
the victory that overcome th the world." 

There are many who will not accept the relig- 
ion of the New Testament because it is a system 
founded on faith. They declare their religion is 
one of sight, reason, common sense. What their 
eyes can see and their hands can handle, they 
claim is their religion, and repudiate faith. 

The faith required in our common life and that 
demand in religion is the very same in kind, the 



2l6 THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 

only difference is one of degree. Religious faith 
is refined and exalted, and centred not in the ma- 
terial and earthly, but in the spiritual and eternal. 

That faith is a ground of confidence as to things 
hoped for in our ordinary life, requires no very 
deep thinking to clearly perceive. Here it is the 
victory that overcometh the world. It is the evi- 
dence of the unseen, hence victory over the world. 

It is possible to trace a germinal faith step by 
step up to its higher development, until we stand 
on the vantage ground of a religious experience, 
in which process we may test the truth of our 
statement. 

A mother may tell her child not to put its hand 
on the hot stove lest it be burned. The child has 
never experienced the sensation of heat, scorch- 
ing and consuming the quivering tissues of flesh. 
It has not been taught by pain. But with faith in 
the mother's wisdom and superior skill obeys her. 

"But," you say, "this, if faith at all, is very 
germinal. It is too closely allied to what we call 
instinct, to observe any line of demarcation." Yet 
we may see, if we look closely, in this act an incip- 
ient faith, weak and low in type though it be. 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 217 

Now go a step higher. A father says to his hoy, 
11 Now, my lad, if you are studious and obedient 
during the spring term, at school, and stand well 
in your classes, when the summer vacation comes, 
I will take you to the mountains and the seaside. " 
The boy has faith in his father's words, faith that 
the course of nature will have its wonted way — 
that sun will rise and sun will set, and at last will 
come the eagerly awaited day, when his feet shall 
stand upon the threshold of the vacation season, 
and his eyes behold the fulfillment of his father's 
promises. His faith sustains him through many 
a day of hard study, and weary toil. But after all 
you exclaim, " That is only a child's faith." True. 
It spans a few weeks, or at most, a few months. 
Yet there is in it an element of genuine faith, 

But the boy's faith grows wider and wider. It 
stretches on now with tireless wing. It merges 
into the full-fleged faith of manhood. The man, 
like the boy, has trust in his fellow man, trust that 
the courses of Nature will have their wonted way. 
So he ladens his stately ships, lifts the snowy 
sail, or generates the subtile steam, confident that 
wafted by favoring gales, they will reach their 



2l8 THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 

destined ports and come again with golden freight- 
age. 

Thus all men work in faith. The farmer be- 
holds in the seed of springtime, the yellow harvest 
waving in the autumn breeze, ready to fill to 
overflowing his garner. 

The painter sees in the yet untouched canvas 
that form of perfect beauty, now glowing on the 
secret photographic plate, illumined by genius and 
the imagination, that will by and by challenge the 
world's admiration, and give his name immor- 
tality. The sculptor is quick to catch the angel 
hidden in the rude block of stone, and where others 
see no beauty, beholds the perfect form. 

So all men work in faith, and this is the victory 
that overcometh the world, in battle of brain, of 
brawn, of muscle, of genius for success in the 
chosen spheres of life. 

The humblest citizen that shapes the stone, the 
mighty architect whose genius plans the temple of 
which that stone forms but the lowliest part, must 
both alike work in faith. A great man is strolling 
by the roadside. He dreams of large achievement. 
Now he sits, lost in meditation, on a wayside rock. 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 219 

The lights and shadows that chase each other 
across his face tell of the tempest raging within, as 
now the object of his search rises before him clearly 
revealed, and anon melts, dissolves, and eludes his 
utmost efforts. The frown succeeds the smile, . 
and again the bright eye and the radiant face tell 
of approaching success, as rising from his lowly 
seat in a burst of enthusiasm he exclaims: "I 
will swing the Pantheon in air ! " And Michael 1 
Angelo, Rome's greatest sculptor and architect,, 
beheld the glories of St. Peter's standing before* 
him, when, as yet, not a single stone had been 
laid in its foundation. His eye of faith caught 
the victory. He had faith in priestly and princely 
patronage, that multitudes of workingmen would 
rise up to do his bidding, that the Apennines 
would yield their rock-ribbed sides, and dis- 
tant lands contribute to urge on his enter- 
prise. 

So, too, the scientist who urges upon the world 
the use and education of the much vaunted sense 
— perceptions, as the absolute demand of science, 
cannot go a step in his much loved pursuits, with- 
out dealing with a host of characters unseen and 



1320 THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 

urifelt by the organs of the body, and grasped 
solely by the faculties of the mind. 

We need only to mention, molecules, atoms, 
centres of force and atomic collisions, disease 
germs and physiological units, to make the truth 
of this statement apparent. " The Christian walks 
by faith, " sometimes declares the man of science 
as a matter of reproach. Truly the scientist walks 
by faith, and not by sight. 

He dwells in an unseen world of laws and 
powers, and existences eye hath not seen nor ear 
heard. If we study the history of great scientific 
discoveries and inventions we will find that these 
magnificent achievements were won by men un- 
der the spell of thoughts, feelings and inspiration as 
yet unseen aud unrealized— in a word, they were 
men of faith. Here, too, faith is the victory that 
overcomes the world — the world of dense ignor- 
ance, the veiled world of unseen realities. 

" But this," you say, " is a material faith." 
True, it is the faith of the inventor, the discoverer, 
the man urged on by the love of selfish ambition. 
Is it not also the very kind of faith that prompts 
to large activity the lover of humanity? The 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH, 221 

great and good men of the world have been those 
actuated by large faith. They have believed in 
themselves, their mission, call it destiny, if you 
will, and in the Power above all and over all. 

Rising to the distinct realm of the religious life, 
we meet a faith that spans the abyss between the 
heart of man and the heart of God. It is the 
faith of a John, a Paul, a Polycarp, a Chrysostom, 
a Luther. 

The faith that inspired the great Reformer when 
he heard the voice of Scripture ringing in his ears, 
as he toiled in humble penance, for the good of his 
soul, up Pilate's staircase at Rome: " The just 
shall live by faith." 

The faith of the martyrs. The faith of a Lati- 
mer and Ridley, who could call one to the other 
out of the cruel flames of martyrdom : " We shall 
light a candle in England to-day that all the 
waters of ocean will not be able to put out." 

This is the power that has changed the lives of 
men. Through faith in the Son of God, the Re- 
deemer of the world, are we saved. It has lifted 
from vice to virtue, from, sin to holiness. Trans- 
formation has. followed its-touch. 



222 THE VICTORY OK FAITH. 

Yet how many people refuse to behold its ef- 
fects, or rest satisfied in its results. They scorn 
the Gospel religion, because it is a system found- 
ed upon faith. With this faith they claim they 
will have nothing to do. The eye that ought to 
see the splendid effects of a saving faith in Christ, 
which the history of the individual and the Church 
constantly illustrates, refuses utterly to behold. 
Blind to all the magnificent transformations our 
modern life affords, it persists in matters of relig- 
ion, in not seeing what in everything else is quite 
plain to its observation. 

" My religion,' ' cries one of this class, " is what 
my eyes can see, my hands handle, my intellect 
comprehend. I don't believe in anything I can- 
not understand. " I once said to such a man, who 
boasted of his rationalism, and claimed that his 
was a natural religion, and he did not believe in 
anything he could not fully comprehend. " So 
you do not believe in anything you do not see?" 
" No, sir," he replied, sharp and quick. 

" Well," said I, knowing a certain weakness he 
had, " did you ever see a horse ? " 

His eye kindled. Then he looked to see if I 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 223 

was. not daft. " See a horse? ,! he replied, " why 
you know I have seen many a horse. I have seen 
him on the race course, now with graceful arch of 
neck and dainty tread. Again, I have seen him 
with flowing mane, flashing eye, dilated nostrils, 
and strong, lithe limb, speeding away for the vic- 
tory. I have seen him in war aroused by the blare 
of the trumpet, the boom of cannon, and the ex- 
citement of the terrible onset, amid the smell of 
smoke and powder, and the furious clamor, strain- 
ing every nerve in the awful din of battle. Yes, I 
have seen a horse. I love the horse. I tell you 
he is the noblest animal God ever made." 

11 Take the most beautiful horse, " I replied, 
"you ever saw. He stands before you in the 
flush of a freshly won victory. One blow upon 
the head ! What is that thing upon the sand ? Is 
that the horse ? c No,' you say, c that is only the 
carcass.' Where is the horse ? Where, and what 
was that we called the horse ? Did you ever see 
it? Did you ever touch, handle or comprehend 
that life which made the horse what he was? 
Where did that which really was the horse, re- 
side ? . .Was it in the graceful arch of neck? the 



224 THE 'VICTORY- OF FAITH. 

flow of mane ? the beauty of the body ? the flash 
of eye? the strong, lithe limb that sped away to v 
victory? That dead matter there is not the 
horse, what is the horse? Where is the horse ? 
You believe that he exists ?" 

" Of course," exclaimed my friend, "I believe he 
exists. I never saw the life, but I have seen re- 
peatedly the effects of that life. So I know it 
must be." 

Again, I asked, " Did you ever see yourself ? " 
At this question he was sure I was a little out of 
my head. 

" See myself?" he echoed, " why, of course I 
have," u When? How? Where?" "I have 
looked in the glass many a time," he said, ""I have 
surveyed my hands, my feet, my limbs, my per- 
son. Of course I have seen myself. What an ab- 
surd question." 

" Where are you, then?" I replied. u For 
surely the hands, the feet, the eyes, do not make 
up the sum of your personal identity. What I en- 
quire about is that which you really call your self ^ 
which gives, which is, your self consciousness, and 
makes your personal identity. Ybur soul, your 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 225- 

life. Have you really seen it ? Have you held it 
up to the light in these two hands and exclaimed, 
( Ah 1 here it is. I see, I feel, I know you. You 
cannot escape me now' ? 

" Where does that life reside? Wise men talk 
humbly about it. Where is that which makes the 
man?. '7s it in the brain? The brain may be 
paralyzed, in part at least, I do not know but alto- 
gether, and the man is there yet. Is it in the 
heart?; Is that noble fountain the residence of 
the man, the life? The heart may be paralyzed 
in part, I do not know but altogether, and the, 
man is there yet in the temple of the body. Did 
you ever find the exact place where the life holds 
its court ? Did you ever pluck it hence ? Did 
you ever analyze it ? Can you say, because of any. 
such research, acquaintance, or dissection, 'Iknow 
you, O life ! I understand and comprehend you* ? 
How do you know you exist?" 

" Because," replied my friend, u I see the effects 
of this life within me, and seeing what it does I 
believe it really exists, although I cannot see or 
handle it with these natural organs." 

"Just so," I replied, " you may • -see the effects 



226 THE VICTORY OF FAITH, 

of this spiritual force we call faith. The 
Christian preacher does not bid you, in or- 
der that you may believe, understand all truth 
or to be able to analyze faith and compre- 
hend its exact nature. Behold the effects of a 
living faith, not in a thing or a dogma, but in a 
matchless life. See this faith changing for the 
better the stream of human conduct. Accept it 
because you may behold its wondrous power in the 
transformed lives of men and women. Behold it 
in the light of its results, l The victory that over- 
cometh the world/ " 

Not only are we taught by the Apostle Paul 
that faith is the substance of things hoped, and 
so " the victory that overcometh the world, " but 
that faith is also " The evidence of things unseen." 
By which we are not to think of faith as accepting 
blindly whatever of spiritual import chances to 
cross her path. She is not the prey of chance. 
Faith is not that which impelled by constitutional 
appetite rushes to gratify its passion and seize its 
object. That is instinct, bound by the laws that 
limit, control and stamp it what it is. 

Neither is faith, that which when all the proofs 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 227 

have been given, accepts them as conclusive. In 
a geometrical problem, step by step we may trace 
a process and develop a demonstration until the 
conclusion must be received. But this is not fait k 
but reason, beholding in the Master light of its 
own seeing. 

" Faith," says Paul, " is the evidence of things 
unseen." It is in itself and to itself reason, proof 
and end. 

In another place this same sacred writer de- 
clares, '• Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
have entered into the heart of man the things 
which God hath prepared for them that love 
Him." 

Mark you, this is no dreamy expectation of what 
the future may unfold. It is not of what God 
shall prepare that he speaks, but what he hath 
prepared. It is a present heaven. 

This passage, warm with the glow of the in- 
spired imagination, is no mere flight of golden 
eloquence, penned to adorn a letter, or wing a 
rhetorical period. Paul speaks the words of sober- 
ness and truth. He tells here of the sheer impos- 
sibility of the natural man to comprehend the 



22.8. - r - THE VICTORY OF FAITH* 

things of the spirit. " No genius of earth," he de- 
clares, in the moments of his greatest exaltation, 
ever yet caught sight of the heaven of God, or with 
ears delicately attuned, was ravished with the 
melody that sweeps from Seraph's harp." To the 
unregenerate heart this is impossible. But to the 
eye of faith, to the soul born of the spirit all 
spiritual vision is possible. Heaven is a present 
reality to Christian faith. " God hath prepared it 
for them that love Him," and receiving His Christ, 
become the sons of God. 

And this is not so much an education of intel- 
lect as it is an illumination of heart. 

Tholuck, in his preface to the translation of 
that admirable book, u His Hours of Devotion," 
wrote : " I have been young, but now am old — I 
have spent a whole life-time in battling against 
infidelity with the weapons of apologetic science, 
— but have become ever more and more convinc- 
ed that the way to the heart does not lie through 
the head; and that the only way to the conver- 
sion of the head lies through a converted heart, 
which already tastes the fruit of the Gospel." 

It is the humble, and purified.. heart, mellowed 



THE VICTORY OF FAITH. 229 

by an unswerving faith, that enters into the secret 
place of the Most High, and abiding under the 
shadow of the Almighty, beholds the secret of that 
heaven which is already prepared for the believ- 
er's heart. 

This is faith in the personal Lord Jesus Christ, 
the incarnate Redeemer of the world. 

The faith that leads the feet through summer's 
heat and winter's cold, amid the thorn and flint of 
the rough way, and storms and buffetings, up to 
those heights where God and His angels dwell in 
cloudless peace. And even now and here, 

The man whose heart on God is stayed, 

Is kept in perfect peace ; 
At threshold of his inner life 

All worldly storm must cease. 

" For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the 
world ; and this is the victory that overcometh the 
world, even our faith." 



SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 



The man ivho seeks one thing in life, and but one, 
May hope to achieve it before life be done ; 
But he who seeks all things, wherever he goes, 
Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows, 
A harvest of barren regrets. 

Seekest thou great things for thyself f 

Jer. xlv:5. 



XII. 



SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 

A young woman at Niagara Falls saw a beauti- 
ful flower growing a little ways down on the jag- 
ged precipice near which she was standing. She 
longed to make that fair blossom her own. Lean- 
ing over the abyss to pluck the treasure, the roar 
of the waters caused her to lift her eyes. The 
awful sight and tremendous rush and noise, con- 
fused and bewildered her. Yet possessed of one 
thought, that she must have that prize, she strug- 
gled to grasp it, when, horror of horrors ! the 
earth on which she leaned gave way, and she 
plunged a bleeding corpse on the sharp stones be- 
low. 

In this true incident we may behold a parable 
of the lamentable ending of too vaulting ambition. 



234 SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 

It lures its captivated victim, not to the goal oi 
honor and emolument, but to destuction. 

The interrogation, " Seekest thou great things 
for thyself ?" was addressed to a young and am- 
bitious man. 

Baruch was the secretary and confidential friend 
of Jeremiah, the prophet. 

History records that he looked forward to 
riches, honor, preferment, and even to the posses- 
sion of the prophetic office. 

He took down in writing the sad prophesies of 
his master, regarding the overthrow of his coun- 
try. The coming disaster disheartened and em- 
bittered him. He saw in it the doom of his own 
hopes. But the just old prophet, instead of 
soothing him with false comforts, only adds to his 
fears. He reminds his servant that his life is in 
the hands of God, and that he will receive his por- 
tion of the coming calamity. 

His disappointment was great. The spirit of 
an apostate seized him. " Dost thou seek great 
things for thyself? Seek them not," warns the 
prophet. 

But he is consoled with the thought that his 



SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 235 . 

life shall be spared, though snatched from the - 
general wreck, as a prey from the teeth of the 
hounds. He will have prosperity according to his - 
ability and faithful conduct. 

So we are led to observe, a man's seeking and- 
success depends upon, — 

I. His resources. 

II. His standard of attainment. 

I. A man's revenues are not simply treasures 
of intellect or coffers of gold, not brawn nor brain, 
but they are largely moral. The moral purposes 
and elements are what mark us men. All 
other characteristics we have in common with the 
lower life around us. 

It is not from the perfection of his lower nature 
or of this or that physical trait that we judge a 
man. Our estimate is drawn from the develop- 
ment of his higher nature. It is the ultimate pur- 
pose of life that becomes our critical gauge. The 
grass is valued for its leaf. If that is perfect and 
abundant, its end is reached. In the shrub whose 
beauty adorns the lawn, it is not the leaf alone, 
but bud and blossom that make up the measnre of 
our judgment, while in the orchard and the vine- 



-236 SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 

yard, the pink and pearly blossoms of the spring- 
time or the luxuriance of foliage do not avail to 
complete our estimate of value. The rosy fruit, 
the purpling clusters, the blood-red vintage must 
first bear the test of criticism, ere judgment is 
pronounced. In the grass the leaf is all that is 
expected, but we look for more than leaf in tree 
and vine. We gauge everything by its essential 
element, the supreme end of its existence. 

So of man. The lower must reach up to the 
higher. Judge him not by foot, eye, muscle, in- 
tellect, or by his commercial value, what he will 
bring in the market, how he is quoted on 'change. 
You are valued by just how good you are. Your 
moral worth none can take from you. 

There are those before me doubtless seeking 
great things for themselves. Some may not 
achieve the fulfillment of hopes. It is true that 
all cannot attain the dream of earthly ambi- 
tion. 

ik How few that in their earlier years 
Look on to what their life may be, 
Painting the vision of the way 

In colors soft and bright and free, — 
How few who to such years have brought 
The hopes and dreams of earlier thought." 



SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 237 

But manhood, character, moral purpose remain 
an imperishable possession. Goodness is within 
the grasp of all. 

The New Testament code of morals, unique and 
unimpeachable, may be the heritage of every life. 
Love, and its transcendant ideal, may inspire every 
soul. To incarnate the ethics of Jesus is the sum- 
mit of the worthiest ambition. 

II. The standard of attainment. 

The ideal standard of manhood is found in Jesus 
of Nazareth. No grander conception of ideal man- 
hood has ever been lifted before moral gaze. 

" The claim of an extravagant, self-deluding en- 
thusiasm," says Dr. Channing, " Is the last to be 
fastened on Jesus. His benevolence, too, though 
singularly earnest and deep, was composed and 
serene. He did good with the tranquility and 
constancy, which mark the Providence of God." 

" Whatever else may be taken away from us by 
rational criticism," writes J. S. Mill, " Christ is 
left. There is no way to find a better translation 
of the rule of virtue, from the abstract into the 
concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ 
would approve our life." 



238 SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 

Rousseau says, " Yes, if the life and death of 
Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death of 
Jesus are those of a God." 

" As little as humanity will ever be without re- 
ligion, as little will it be without Christ. He re- 
mains the highest model of religion within the 
reach of our thought ; and no perfect piety is pos- 
sible without His presence in the heart," was the 
avowal of the infidel, Strauss, in 1838. 

He that is not against Christ is for Him. 

" Jesus is the purest among the truly mighty, the 
mightiest among the pure," cries Richter, " who 
with his pierced hand still continues to rule and 
guide the ages." 

" The doctrines of Christ have become the words 
of eternal life in the mouth of their founder," de- 
clares Baur, the scholar and critic. 

" Whatever the surprises of the future," con- 
cedes Renan, " Jesus will never be surpassed. 
All ages will proclaim that among the sons of men 
there is none born greater than Jesus." 

For His truth, His wisdom, His love, His sym- 
pathy, His kindly and gentle humanity, and for 
His revelation of the divine life that dwells in 



SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 239 

humanity does the world's heart revere, trust and 
adore Him, whose words are eternal life. 

Jesus as the standard of manhood remains the 
same yesterday and to-day and forever. He is the 
ideal for the physician, all professional life, and 
for every young man. - 

Seekest thou great things for thyself, thou wilt 
find them in seeking great things for others. 

A high standard of what the physician ought 
to be, will be included in the highest ideal of 
manhood, as the man should never be sunken in 
the profession. I remark that this implies intense 
earnestness. It demands working at doctor versus 
playing at doctor. 

The ideal of excellency is found in symmetri- 
cal thought. What is meant by a good physician ? 
The healing art is not limited by physical environ- 
ment. The microbe is not alone the object for 
which the wise physician uncovers his lancet, or 
conjures up the spirit of chemistry. He must rec- 
ognize the intellectual and psychic also. Body, 
intellect and soul are man's triple nature, three in 
one. A new class of phenomenon arises when 
from matter you reach mind, morals, spirit. 



240 SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 

Hence the physician needs to feel his responsi- 
bility. His life task is so great. Its emoluments 
are hearts as well as coin. 

He needs to feel how august the task God has 
set for him to do. 

" He has sounded forth the trumpet, 

That shall never call retreat ; 
He is sifting out the hearts of men. 

Before His judgment seat : 
O, be swift my soul to answer Him, 

Be jubilant my feet. 
Our God is marching on." 

Dealing with both physical and psychic, he 
should be a man of moral insight. Of all men lie 
should be a good man. 

No other has such opportunities for doing good 
as the physician. 

He should be a man of sympathy. 

He should have an enthusiasm for humanity, 
and love it. Love so well, that he dare rebuke its 
wrong doing. Tolerant of frailty ; hopeful of the 
best. 

This is an age of toleration, witness the trend of 
thought in theology. The evangelical alliance 
marks an epoch in sectarian life. The social 
world is feeling the impulse of great thinking aiid 



SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 241 

spontaneous feelings as never before. Witness the 
spectacle of an arch rebel being borne to the grave 
amid high religious and civic honors. The like 
the world has never seen. It is an age of tolera- 
tion. 

If you truly seek great things for yourselves,, 
you must seek the same for all in the circle of 
your influence. 

If you seek to approach anywhere near the 
ideal standard of the physician and the man, you 
must, in a more abundant measure, seek the good 
of others. Self-annihilation will often be found 
to be the road of highest achievement. 

It will be your duty as citizens and as patriots, 
as well as in your professional capacity, to help 
educate the youth of the land, to mold the moral 
tone of the mothers of the coming generation, so 
that they will prize the watchful care of an im- 
mortal soul as more precious than that of a Japan- 
ese pug ; and to esteem children as a heritage 
from the Lord, and not to be driven ruthlessly 
from our American hearthstones, to find place in 
the cellars of penury or the scanty quarters of our 
immigrant population. 



242 SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 

It will be a part of your noble and far-reaching 
task to raise up mothers in America, not ashamed 
of maternity, nor selfishly shirking the solemn and 
stupendous duties of motherhood ; exchanging its 
priceless coronet for the baubles of society, or the 
personal enrichments and pleasures of selfish ease. 
These are times of wide spread demand for the 
rights of American women. It will be your part 
to help to instill in the minds of our country's 
women, the priceless right to be mothers of a 
noble race. 

The physician should, by patient learning, make 
himself worthy to have a voice in the world's ed- 
ucation, and on all questions of public morals, He 
should be heard, speaking with the voice of science 
on the wisdom of legislation where it touches 
man's physical or moral nature. The physician 
should be an ideal citizen, ready, sound in 
learning, trustworthy, a lover of humanity, 
conscientiously discharging his lofty obliga- 
tions. 

Seekest thou great things for thyself ? Seek as 
Man, as Citizen, as Physician, as Christian, under 
the pierced hand of Him, who is the world's great 



SEEKING GREAT THINGS. 243 

Physician, to minster in self denying ardor at the 
liigh altars of humanity. 

" Still, in thy right hand carry gentle peace 

To silence envious tongues ; 

Be just and fear not. 

Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's, 

Thy God's and truth's.* > 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 



Immortal Love, forever full, 

Forever flowing free, 
Forever shared, forever whole, 

A never ebbing sea. 

Fulfill the law of Christ. 

Gal. vi:2, 



XIII. 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 

A philosophical writer has said, "what we re- 
quire is no new revelation, but a better under- 
standing of the real essence of Christianity. " Every- 
where in nature we behold evidences with what 
ease her great works are being performed. They 
declare not gigantic efforts, but bear witness to 
appalling power. u It is not the weariness of mortal- 
ity," says a great thinker, " but the strength of di- 
vinity, which we have to recognize, in all mighty 
things. But that is just what we never recog- 
nize, but think that we are to do mighty things 
by the help of iron bars and perspiration." 

Our text announces a law of human hearts and 

lives. It is the principle or force by which the most 

can be made of the life that now is, that is express- 



248 THE LAW OF LOVE. 

ed in the words : " Bear ye one another's bnrdens, 
and so fulfill the law of Christ. " That law is 
the royal law of love. "Anew commandment give 
I unto you that ye should love one another. 5 ' This 
law the Redeemer fulfilled in His life. He was in 
Himself, the practical exponent of His doctrine : 
" For whosoever shall save his life shall lose it; 
but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake, the 
same shall save it." We have then, 

I. A universal law, and 

II. Its fulfillment in practical life. 

A universal law. This law is a law of the 
human heart. " Out of the heart are the issues of 
life," says the Holy Book. Man is made with 
sympathies and affections which, rightly devel- 
oped, bid him respond to the needs of other lives. 

Everything has its supreme law or ground work 
of principle which makes it what it is. The reign 
of law, both in the physical and moral world, is a 
familiar topic to the student, and even the ordi- 
nary reader of current events. The particles of 
stone, a bit of pure alabaster, or the enduring 
granite are held together by cohesion. Take a 
drop of water. It is what it is, through the chem- 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 249 

ical affinity o( two gases which, compose it. 
Gravitation holds the stars in their places. L,ove 
holds the heart in its orbit. 

This law is nniversal. For many, many 
years men have been seeking some deep 
principle which binds the universe together. 
At one time it was said to be, harmony 
with our environment. The fish is perfectly 
adapted to skim through the waves, and de- 
velops amid the waters of stream, lake or ocean 
deep. The bird was made to fly ; to spring up- 
ward on the buoyant billows of the lambent, trem- 
ulous air. The tiniest insect and the most gigan- 
tic creature are in harmony with their environ- 
ment. The miseries of human life come from not 
being in harmony with environment. 

Again ; scientific thinkers said the principle that 
binds all together is "the survival of the fittest." 
The fish that is weak is eaten ; the little going 
under ; the greatest swallowing up the least. 
Yet the world everywhere exhibits the principle of 
mutual helpfulness. Everywhere we may behold 
the interdependence of all forms of life upon each 
other, and upon other life. The coral insect, the 



250 THE LAW OF LOVE. 

beaver, the rook, the elephant, by union of purpose 
accomplish what cannot be done otherwise. They 
bear each other's burdens. So, through all 
the material kingdom, force is resolved into 
force, power transformed into power. God and na- 
ture are never at strife. Nature's apparent evil is 
but good in the making. Strange and mysterious 
are many of her ways, and past finding out. The 
veil that hides her secret purposes bewilders and 
puzzles mind and heart. Yet amid apparent reck- 
lessness and carnage, she never forgets her ulti- 
mate aim. She is careful of the type, nor is she 
careless of the single life. Love speaks in nature, 
as in human hearts. The highest life, in nature, 
ever stoops to clasp the lower to its bosom. 

God is never unmindful of the soul life, He has 
for divine purposes enshrined it in a setting of sor- 
row, tribulation and affliction. Let us remember, 
that, what are the contradictions of life to us, are 
no contradictions to Him. When we hear Eng- 
land's Laureate sing : 

kt O, life as futile then, as frail, 

O, for thy voice to soothe and bless, 
What hope of answer or redress, 
Behind the veil, behind the veil ? '' 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 251 

* 

We may be sure there is an answer behind the 
veil. And he, 

44 Who trusted God was love indeed,, 
And love creation's final law," 

will not be cheated of his hope and trust. 

The principle of mutual helpfulness witness- 
ed in the natural world has its adaptation 
to man's life. There is in a sense no real 
independence of the individual. We are all 
dependent. The great painting, " Christ Before 
Pilate," the admiration of the age, is not simply the 
work of Munkacsy. We are the heirs of all the 
ages. The great masters painted this masterpiece. 

When Gladstone rises to address the House of 
Commons, it is not simply the towering form and 
stupendous intellect of the Hercules of the nine- 
teenth century that thunders and scintillates* 
Invisible forms, clad in the garb of the long past, 
step over the threshold and stand beside him on 
the rostrum. Burke, Pitt, O'Connell, Lord Bacon, 
Shakespeare, Elizabeth, in her gorgeous robes of 
state, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Julius Caesar in the 
dress of a Roman senator, flush with the victory 
of his legions, and uttering the voice of imperial 



252 THE LAW OF LOVE. 

^wisdom, are there. And back from the dawn, out of 
the palaces of the Pharoahs, or stepping down 
from Sinai's awful peak, and face shining with su- 
pernatural lustre, comes the warrior, poet, philos- 
opher, statesman, Moses, whom the world remem- 
bers for what he did, not for his mistakes. Spectres 
and shadows of the past they stand behind the 
man of flesh and blood. Their tireless hands bear 
the burdens of this throbbing, volcanic age ; and 
touching the lips of the speaker they pour their 
wisdom through them. 

This law has its fulfillment in practical life. 
Every man is called upon to help bear the burdens 
of the world. No man liveth to himself. He owes 
it as his lowest duty to society to seek to fulfill 
this law. Society has a right to seek every cit- 
izen, and to demand of him that he acquit himself, 
up to the brim of his capacity and opportunity, in 
her behalf. All that a man hath in the nature of 
education, training, scope for the exercise of bent, 
opportunity to make something more of himself 
than ordinary, to be something more than medi- 
ocrity permits, he owes to the conferment of society. 
It has a right to say, "I seek you." How out- 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 253 

rageously and consummately selfish is the man 
who has no time from his own affairs, to 
serve the state. 

The different nations of the old world had 
a mission and fulfilled it. Our heritage has 
been produced step by step through the evolu- 
tion of the centuries. The Hebrew civiliza- 
tion, Greek and Roman ideas, the crudeness, as 
well as the culture of the past, has been transmitted 
to our time. We are what we are simply because 
the stamp of the generations that have lived before 
us is on our brow. We are under the obligation 
of gratitude. We ought to give, because of the 
rich conferments we have received, without effort 
of our own, without money and without price. 
Blood and treasure have been expended, but not 
our blood, or our treasure. 

The sublimest idea of the centuries is that de- 
clared by the Man of Calvary : " Love one 
another." This seed-thought and germ of spirit- 
ual growth gave a new impulse to life upon our 
globe. 

The highest motive is, I am here to serve, not I 
am here to be served. The divine man came to 



354 Tw & law of love. 

minister, not to be ministered unto. He that loseth 
liis life shall save it. Success or money are not 
the most important things in a man's career. Din- 
ner is not the main object of a healthy, intellectual 
and well balanced man, though he likes to eat a 
good dinner. "The clergyman's object," says Rus- 
kin, "is essentially to baptize and preach, not to be 
paid for baptizing and preaching." So of doctors. 
They like fees, no doubt, ought to like them, yet 
if they are brave and well educated the main ob- 
ject of their lives is not fees. They on the whole 
desire to cure the sick; and, if they are good doc- 
tors, and the choice were fairly put to them, would 
rather cure the patient and lose the fee, than kill 
him, and get it. So with all other brave and 
rightly trained men ; their work first, their fee 
second — very important always, but still second. 
It is a symptom of a diseased and degenerated 
moral system to put that first which ought to be 
second. 

The highest service is born of the highest love. 
The noblest object of the educated, intelligent 
man is to be useful, and, in the line of capacity, to 
help his day and generation. As professional 



THE LAW OF LOVE. 255 

men, as Christians, as citizens, he who fits him- 
self for usefulness will find it. The world worships 
success. But cruel and heartless as it is rep- 
resented as being, it is ready to acknowledge 
merit. Shams it will not tolerate when the cover- 
ing of supposed value and helpfulness has been 
stripped from them. You have heard that some 
physicians have ridden into popularity and exten- 
sive practice by petty deceits and strategic tricks. 
There was a man who came to Columbus with the 
idea that w T hat the world wanted was dash and 
humbug. He hied him to an office, and bought 
two horses. The patients were few ; but with 
discriminating skill he made the most of those he 
had — the two horses. He made surgical incisions 
in their flesh with his whip, and drove furiously 
up and down the principal streets. " Smart doctor,' ' 
the people said ; " big practice ; very popular. He 
will soon be the leading physician in town." But 
some one of about his own calibre followed him one 
day. His reputation was punctured ; his trick dis- 
covered; his sign came down and his horses were 
sold. He led in emigration to a spot less warm 
with ridicule. 



256 THE LAW OF LOVE. 

The world needs helpers ; men whose religion 
is to help bear its burdens so far as they may, 
and so fulfil the law of Christ. Love is creation's 
final law, and he who loses his life, in self- 
renouncement for the sake of others shall find it. 
Never did society need such men as now. The 
woe, unrest and trouble of the world is surging to 
the surface as never before. Outside of your 
garden wall and mine the cry of human 
need, its fever moan of pain, and clamor of dis- 
quietude, smites the air. Within are possessions 
of heart, of intellect, wealth of some sort or 
other. 

This ability is not simply to shed sweet de- 
light or passing fragrance on a quiet spot. The 
rewards and opportunities of great service are 
abundant and certain. Devotion to duty and lofty 
aim will not fail of recognition. Life's crowning 
awaits him who pants, in the line of his knowledge, 
to help the suffering sons of men. There is a call 
— and a loud one — for the spirit of loving service 
and mutual helpfulness in church, in home, in all 
the vocations of life. 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD 



Blow, winds of God, awake, and blow 

The mists of earth away ; 
Shine out, Light divine ! and show 

How wide and far we stray. 

I am the Light of the world. 

John ix:5. 



XIV. 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

Men of metaphysical minds dwell on terms and 
definitions. When Jesus speaks everybody can 
understand Him. The Gospels are the germ of 
which the epistles are the tree in blossom and 
frnit. Jesus had the marvelous art of substituting 
things for terms. He taught all mysteries and 
doctrines, but He never once named them. You 
never hear Him talking of justification through 
imputed righteousness. He utters a parable. 
There is the rich setting of the story of the prodi- 
gal son. Poor boy ! He leaves home. Turns his 
back upon father's teaching. Breaks through re- 
straint. The bud of sin ; the wine of dissipation ; 
the ecstacy and meretricious joy of salicious revel 
are all tasted by him. His follies squeeze him out 



26o THE UGHT OF THK WORLD. 

like a rag wrung dry. So low ; he dwells in the 
fields and his social repast is with the swine. Rag- 
ged, wretched, hungry, ashamed he comes home ; 
on that poor wretched boy the father's love and 
grace put a robe, shoes, and even a ring. Any 
x:hild can understand that. And yet, there is im- 
puted righteousness in the robe ; the alacrity ot 
obedience in the shoes ; and adoption of a son and 
heir in the ring. 

u So Jesus," says one, M never spoke of the doc- 
trines of election and predestination." But turn 
to the tenth chapter of John's gospel. He gives 
there two parables, each representing a half truth, 
combined how beautiful is the glorious whole. 

We see here the sheep fold of which He is the 
door. " I am the door." There is the other para- 
ble of the flock of which He is the Shepherd. The 
true doctrine — not the perverted one — of electing 
grace speaks to us from the threads of this beauti- 
ful parable. How do I get to Heaven ? By my- 
self? No. By going in at the door set for me. 
That is election. 

Again Jesus emphasizes the truth. "I am the 
Good Shepherd." 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 261 

Here is predestination ; vicarious sacrifice ; ef- 
fectual calling ; prevenient grace ; and holy obedi- 
ence. Back of all the Shepherd's love. All here. 
Not names, not definitions, but things. 

In like manner when His influence on the 
wrorld is to be portrayed He teaches by things, not 
terms. 

" I am the light of the world." Hear John put 
the same glorious fact, " In Him was life, and the 
life was the light of men." We understand at a 
glance that it is His life ; His character that is 
.spoken of. 

" Character," says a great American, " is cen- 
trality ; the impossibility of being displaced, or 
overset." 

It is His character that is to be a solar centre 
as the sun of day is a centre for the solar system, 
and the source of the world's light and life. 

The inquiring mind is eager to behold cause for 
■effect. Food must be adapted to the organism, 
that receives it, or it is valueless. What would 
nourish an oak tree, or a rose bush would starve a 
man. 

The bread that gives strength and sleekness to 



262 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

an elephant or a giraffe, would leave man desolate 
and wretched in the midst of abundance. 

There must be fitness and adaption to require- 
ments or there can be no advancement; stagna- 
tion and death will ensue. 

What is true of the material is also true in the 
intellectual history and struggles of the race, and 
prevails in all the struggles and strivings of the 
spiritual nature to reach its ideals. 

In history man sees the golden grains of truth 
filtered from the debris of generations, as on the 
sides of the Sierra Nevadas particles of gold are 
washed from the mountains. 

History is "Philosophy teaching by example. " 

You ask "Why the crusades ?" A Peter, the Her- 
mit, incandescent with one great thought, a St. Ber- 
nard, preaching with a passion for holiness, rise up. 

Why the Reformation of the 16th Century? 
A Luther towers before us, and we read the story 
of his life. 

Why a convulsed Europe in the latter part of 
the last century? We see a tyrannical throne and 
a starving people — the figure of the great Napo- 
leon confronts the gaze. 



THE LIGHT OF THK WORLD. 263 

Why the great rebellion in America ? We are 
startled at the awful abyss of slavery ; emancipa- 
tion and the figure of a Phillips or a Lincoln tells 
the tale. 

This is the incarnation of history. 

So in the physical world, means are adapted to 
ends everywhere. 

We marvel at the evidences of design and adap- 
tation in all nature. Look at a single thing, a 
bird's egg. Why is one egg round and another elon- 
gated? we ask. Behold the reason in the skill of 
Him who has adapted means to ends everywhere, 
giving everything its mission ; its purpose. 
11 Birds that lay their eggs in holes, " says 
Buckland, the naturalist, "have round eggs." 
Certain birds, however, incubate their eggs with- 
out any nest, on the edges of rocky precipices. In 
this position, the egg is in a position so as to be in 
danger of being accidentally moved by the wind, 
or the parent bird. If the egg was round it would 
foil off the ledge and get smashed. See how the 
problem of the preservation of this egg is man- 
aged by the creative wisdom of Him whose ways 
are not as our ways, or his thoughts as our 



264 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

thoughts. The egg of the Guillemot, for example, 
is not round but elongated at one end ; conse-' 
quently when set gently in motion, it does not roll' 
off, but like a screw near the edge of the table; 
when touched by the finger, instead of rolling off 
the edge, it turns gently on its small end, its own 
axis. Can you conceive of anything more beauti- 
ful than this arrangement of the eggs of birds that 
have their nests on rocks? The great Creator, 
in that matchless beginning of His, made all- 
things good. 

How sublime the birth of Him who was fitted 
to be the world's Redeemer. Sings Lowell : 

" Men think it is an awful sight 

To see a soul just set adrift 
On that drear voyage, from whose night, 

The ominous shadows never lift ; 
But 'tis more awful to behold 

A helpless infant newly born, 
Whose little hands unconscious hold 

The keys of darkness and of morn." 

To this marvellous being, the Christ child, 
cradled in a manger, the keys of death and hell,' 
of life and hope, were committed. 

Whence comes the brightening glory of our 
civilization? we ask. Because His life, His char- 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 265 

acter, He, Himself is in it. He is the bread of 
life. This bread has nourished the spiritual 
strength of the world. The race has known peri- 
ods of gathering brightness and glory, but never 
any that so demonstrated the adaptation of Christ 
and His doctrine to the needs of humanity as 
this. The spirit of brotherhood, of peace and 
love, are witnessed in the triumph of Christianity 
everywhere. 

Historians tell us, that, there have been seven 
golden ages of history : the Age of the Ptolemies in 
Egypt; of Augustus in Rome; of Pericles in 
Greece ; of Leo X. in Italy ; of Ivan III. in Russia; 
of Louis XIV. in France ; of Elizabeth in England. 

But notwithstanding the golden splendor of 
these ages, through the stately grandeur of archi- 
tecture, the magnificence of sculpture, the beauty 
of painting, the mellifluous cadence and refine- 
ment of poetry, the enchanting spell of sweetest 
song, the cultivation of the intellect, their heroic 
.and warlike exploits, and dazzling pomp and 
pageantry, the lot of the few, surround these Ages 
with a halo of glory ; they were as ages of stone 
and iron when we consider their interest in, and 



266 the: light of the world. 

achievements for, the common humanity. What 
did these periods do to alleviate woe, to assuage 
pain, and pour the subtile tides of sympathy, 
warm with brotherly love, into the heart of the 
multitude? It was only so far as Christ touched 
some of them that they were real helpers of hu- 
manity. For the most part it was the. old story, 
the many sheaves of Joseph's brethren bowing 
down to the one sheaf. But think how He, who 
said, u I am the light of the world, " has verified 
His prophecy unto his people. 

At the height of Athenian and Roman culture, 
love of humanity, there was none. Jesus was the 
first philanthropist ; He loved the world, and the 
light of His love has proven the world's life. He 
is the bread of life ; He is the light of the world ; 
look about you and behold the shining of his light 
—of Christ himself, in asylums, hospitals, and 
philanthropic institutions of every kind. The 
benefit the world has derived from Him whose life 
and character is the light of. the world, depends 
upon the reception it has given to Jesus. , The 
good, the Light of the World does us, depends up- 
on the reception we give Him. There are many 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 267 

false and imperfect ways in which He is received. 
Some people have so much of Christ that you feel 
a joy in meeting them ; it is like stepping out into 
the sunlight. There are other people, who say 
they are Christians, but they strike one like a chill- 
ing frost or a thunder cloud, if you get within a 
rod of them. 

Let us study this subject, that we may eschew 
the wrong way, and give the right RECEPTION to 
Him who is the Light of the World. 

On some people the light of Jesus' life appears to 
have no effect. They sit in the noon day splendor 
of gospel light. But it is without avail. In light or 
shadow they remain the same. As a bit of hard 
coal or stone receives no ray of sunlight into its 
structure, so many a human heart seems impervi- 
ous to the influence of moral and spiritual truth. 
The Light of the World, to change and nourish the 
soul, must be received. 

Again, there are some who receive and transmit 
intellectually and emotionally a little of the light 
of Christ's moral teachings, but the power of re- 
ception is feeble ; transmission is slow. Smoky 
quartz and ground glass will receive and transmit 



^68 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

some of the rays of the white light of day. But 
the room that depends for its light upon such sub- 
stances will remain in the twilight at noon. 

I have sometimes walked through a New Eng- 
land forest in the golden glory of October, when 
^ever and anon summery days come to remind one 
of June's fleeting footsteps. Every leaf has felt 
the touch of an artist's brush ; each tree-top is a 
coronal of splendor ; emerald, ruby, topaz, ame- 
thyst, jasper, and chrysolite are there, erubescent 
and translucent. No crown of monarch ever held 
such jeweled radiance. Above, the white light 
streams down on the gem-like foliage ; but only a 
little of it trickles through that splendor to greet 
the eye of him who walks beneath in those forest 
aisles ; around the trunks of the great trees reigns 
obscurity. So many a gifted intellect and amiable 
soul transmits the light of the world imperfectly, 
and remains unchanged 'for all His pellucid shining. 

There is a self-righteous and polished moral na- 
ture and disposition, which refuses to acknowledge 
the real centre of its power. It denies allegiance 
to the one light of existence, Christ, as lending 
unity to all the lower motives of living, as the 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 269 

supreme principle of conduct. Such, reflect with- 
out receiving His light. The mirrors, used by the 
officials of the coast survey service, for purposes of 
telegraphic communication, flash the sunlight from 
point to point ; they reflect light, but do not retain 
it for their own development. 

The eye that would see the King in His beauty 
must drink in the light, and be changed by it. The 
natural eye hath not seen, yet the touch of the 
spirit will reveal this Heavenly vision. Said a 
critic of Turner's landscapes to the artist, " I 
never saw such colors of cloud as you paint. " 
" Don't you wish you could, " replied the artist. 

As the eye, quickened by the spirit of genius, 
sees what nowhere appears to the dull eye of the 
ordinary man, so the soul, enkindled by the Spirit 
of God, beholds all life clothed with rare and di- 
vine attributes beneath the shining of the Sun of 
Righteousness. 

The only danger, lies not in the mere reflection 
of truth, while the heart and intellect remain un- 
changed, but in the positive perversion of it. The 
light of truth as it comes from Jesus or the Bible, 
may be impaired, warped and twisted by the in- 



270 THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 

tellect that attempts its transmission. Yet that 
intellect itself may remain nnchanged. A noted 
infidel studied the doctrines of Jesus simply to 
warp them ; to enhance the lustre of a specious 
philosophy of existence concocted in the stagnant 
exhalations of his own conceited brain. 

Two convicts hung for their crimes confessed, 
that they had both been under conviction of sin, 
and very near conversion. But they wanted to 
lead such lives, as would trample on all laws hu- 
man and divine, so they deliberately argued them- 
selves into the belief that the Bible was a fraud, 
the Gospels a bundle of lies. Thus the in- 
tellect hoodwinked the conscience, and they rushed 
onward in their destructive career. 

A mere intellectual reception and transmission 
of the truth, even though in passing through the 
mind it be unimpaired, is not sufficient. The 
white window glass receives the white light of the 
sun, and transmits it as it comes. But the cold 
window pane, that allows the winter sun to pass 
through it, is not in the least changed for the 
better by its power of transmitting light. An 
intellect, clear and transparent in its attitude to- 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 27 1 

wards truth, may yet be totally unchanged by it. 
Intellectual assent to doctrine may not, of neces- 
sity, give it lodgment in the soul, and so 
change, mold, and fashion the life. 

Devils believe with the mind, we are told, and 
tremble. But a trembling devil is not a converted 
devil. If the heart is not reached and quickened, 
you will look in vain for a changed life. 

Yet, is there not a perfect method of reception ? 
When found and assented to, will it not change 
the whole man ? When the soul really sees Christ 
and takes Him in, then the truth of his words, 
" I am the light of the world,' y will appear plain 
unto it. 

What the world really needs is the right re- 
ception of that Life, which is the light of men. 
Its forces and elements must be assimilated to the 
human life. Then it will quicken, change, and 
make over the whole man. Cannot the yearning 
thought of our times be substantially summarized 
in some such way as this? We do not need a 
theory, but a life ; a life here and now, the realiza- 
tion of the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth. 
Even if we -put aside all outward authority, sur- 



272 THE LIGHT OF THK WORLD. 

rendering to the sceptic every citadel which he 
has assailed, there will still remain the Life, unas- 
sailable and beyond the reach of criticism. This 
was from the beginning, the Christ-life. The 
truths of this life are universal. The light of 
this life must be received. Not with the intellect 
alone ; not as a mere sentiment. It must reach 
heart and mind alike and permeate the whole 
man. Then will every thought and feeling be- 
come a painter's stroke, portraying our likeness, 
that is to be. 

Have you not noticed, that a plant, shut up in 
a dark cellar all winter, will lean lovingly towards 
some chink or crevice in the wall, through which a 
tiny ray of sunlight struggles, to kiss its waning en- 
ergies? Why does the plant turn towards the light? 
Because the sun is its life. It hails gladly its 
faintest touch ; without the light it must die. So 
Christ is the soul's life. Without His light, bring- 
ing warmth and vitality, it dies. Then let us, si- 
lently, lovingly weave into the soul the rays that 
fall from Him. 

As the meshes of sunlight are woven into the 
leaves of the forest, and carried downward by 



THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 275 

them, to give vitality to branch, and trunk and 
root ; so, the soul is to receive His light into the 
structure of character, that we may all appear at 
last, with His light transfiguring and shining from 
us, clothed in the ineffable grace of his perfect 
righteousness, and know the full meaning of His 
words, " I am the Light of the World." 



ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY 



I am a man, and I have an interest in everything that con- 
cerns humanity. 

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. 

If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. 

i John iv:ii. 



XV. 



ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 

Great central thoughts have lent unity to and 
controlled the thinking of different ages. 

In the early centuries of the Christian Church 
the one leading idea that swayed men was, the 
thought of God ; then came the thought of man ; 
afterwards the union of God and man engrossed 
the intellect, giving birth to the great doctrines of 
salvation. In our time the focal idea that 
affords motive and inspiration for all noble 
thinking is, man's relation to his fellow 
man. 

How can man most benefit man? How shall the 
masses be saved ? What means can be grasped in 
dealing with the great social problems of the age, 
so that the submerged tenth shall once more gain 



278 ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 

a foothold on the solid rock of civilization and 
respectability ? 

Love makes us debtors to the whole world. We 
are debtors both to the Greek and to the bar- 
barian. The supreme thought in our relation to 
our fellow men, is not, pay me what thou owest ; 
but how can I discharge the debt I owe to you ? 

How shall life be made worth the living unless 
the benefactions of the all bountiful Creator be 
reflected in the limited sphere of human activity 
and duty? Everywhere we get glimpses of the 
divine glory in humanity. These remind us of the 
origin of the race, and that in the lowliest the 
spark of heavenly flame is not all extinct. 

When our dear ones are away from home, how 
constantly we are reminded of them by this or 
that article associated with their presence in the 
household. A gentleman took me into his beautiful 
home. His son and daughter were in Europe. 
"This," he said, " is my daughter's room. Here is 
my son's room. I visit them often ; they remind me 
of the absent ones. You see that picture? My 
daughter left it there when she went abroad, so 
that I could look at it every day and recall her. I 



ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMAINTY. 279 

am now arranging to redecorate and refurnish 
these rooms, so that when they return, they may 
be more than ever pleased with their home. I 
tell you I love them so, I can't do enough for 
them. Their mother died when they were little 
children, and I have just lived for them." Do not 
these reminders of those we love often prove too 
powerful for a tender heart ? Has not God left us 
reminders of His gracious and supreme love 
everywhere? Reminders to think of Him ; reasons 
for loving Him ; motives for affectionate service 
are not want ; He has enshrined himself in hu- 
manity, that we might think well of it. The in- 
carnation of God's thought, life, spirit and char- 
acter, is perpetual. Are ye not all the sons of 
God? It is the divine in humanity that lends 
meaning to this pent up existence. I look upon a 
great picture ; I see that one central idea controls, 
animates, unifies the whole. 

In a building, one focal idea gives purpose and 
unity to many separate parts. In the life of man 
this is also true. The immanent and controlling 
thought of David Livingstone's life was love for 
God and humanity. The key that unlocks the 



28o ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 

secret of such a life as Washington's was its ani- 
mating principle — patriotism. When Luther cried, 
4i Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help 
me," the dominant idea of his life was obedience 
to duty. 

The motive that conspires to the wonderful suc- 
cess of the Christian Endeavor movement in our 
time, is enthusiastic loyalty to Christ, to duty, to 
the Church of God, displayed in its practical 
workings. 

Love for humanity is based, by the Apostle, on 
the love that God bears us ; if God so loved us, 
Ave ought also to love one another. This love, 
either human or divine, must be based on intrinsic 
values, either in the nature of realities or possi- 
bilities. 

So I dare affirm, that enthjisiasm for humanity, 
is an essential factor in a career. The great and 
noble life is the product of great and noble 
motives in living. You cannot get grapes 
of thorns, or figs of thistles. If one's motives 
are mean and purposes are low, the results will 
be mediocre, also. Enthusiasm for humanity is an 
element of a career, because it supplies a motive 



ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 281 

which makes life worth living. This enthusiasm 
springs irom a high ideal of man ; it lifts and ex- 
alts humanity, as worthy of love. 

There is in man a divine and godlike principle. 
Well may we exclaim : " What a piece of work is 
man. How noble in reason ; how infinite in fac- 
ulties ! " For God is in man ; man was made to be 
good, and noble and true. The ultimate fact of 
his life — aught else is snare, and harm, and wrong 
— is, that he will yet be what he was made to be. 
The promise of God is : A new heaven and a new 
earth wherein dwell righteousness. Then, shall 
man reach the ideal, as God sees him. 

If one's motives and ideals are low, then will 
the outcome be mean and low, too. The heart is 
the nursery whence the gnarled and ugly tree, or 
the perfection of beauty and strength must pro- 
ceed. Consider the motives that may operate in 
the formation of a career. Many men seem to be 
controlled by no higher thought than the desire 
to get a living. " I must get a living " is the one 
vulgar motive that pushes them in the struggle of 
existence. Food, shelter and raiment are the ob- 
jective points in life. Their desires rise no 



282 ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 

higher than the nutritive port of entry, and the 
worldly elements of a merely carnal life : What 
shall I eat ? what shall I drink ? and wherewithal 
shall I be clothed ? So sordid such a colorless ex- 
istence, that none of you fear to be stupefied and 
chained by it, that it may be said of you, that, you 
had 

No lofty dream, no hope sublime, 
No panting for a coming time, 
When life shall have diviner joy, 
Ami ampler revenues employ ; 
Content to live upon the clod, 
And sink full soon beneath its sod. 

The second motive I mention, is the ambition- 
to rise. Many a man has started out in life with 
the restless desire to be somebody, to get on and 
up. In some way to make a mark in the world. 
Some such are not apt to be over scrupulous as 
to the means used, to get on. Often they wreck 
themselves on the very rock on which they depend 
for their salvation. Ambition, purely and coldly 
selfish, sooner or later leaves its victim stripped of 
honor and palsied in virtue. 

Aaron Burr and Benedict Arnold both, among 
Americans, wanted to get on in life ; how lament- 



ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 283:, 

able the results achieved ! Let me illustrate this 
spirit of ambition to be foremost by the life of 
Lord Beaconsfield : He dazzled the English pub- 
lic by the phenomenal brilliancy and audacity of 
his intellect and the dash of his statesmanship. 
His liberal rival, Gladstone, seemed to be silenced 
and almost annihilated. Only a few months be- 
fore the downfall of Disraeli, and previous to the 
bursting of the great bubble he had blown up for 
admiration in politics, he appeared at the summit 
of his fame ; returning from the Berlin conference 
" peace with honor " was on his lips, and his for- 
eign policy was regarded as a triumph, scarcely 
equaled by any English statesman. Such, at 
least, was the estimate of his friends. But in 
what a little while his failure was apparent, and 
he was then deserted. So low was the ebb of his 
popularity, that he was actually stoned in the 
streets, and had to flee for his life from the angry 
menaces of a London mob. Then came the Mid- 
lothian campaign ; then the conscience of the 
English people was aroused. Doubtless his mer- 
ciless defeat — a blow all unexpected — hastened 
Beaconsfield's death. 



284 ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 

The one stake, that he played for, was to gratify 
his inordinate thirst for fame, and distinguish him- 
self above all the men of his time. Listen to the 
estimate which Fronde gives of him, and many 
think that this opinion of the historian will not 
be reversed by posterity : u Not one of the great 
^measures which he once insisted on, did he carry, 
or attempt to carry. As a statesman there was 
none like him before, nor will there be any here- 
after. The aim with which he started in life was 
to distinguish himself above all his contemporar- 
ies, and wild as such an ambition must have ap- 
peared, he at least won the stake for which he 
played so heavily." A victory, do we call it? But 
was it worth the trouble ? 

Of such a life may we not say : " Its honors are 
but empty bubbles." Is it not vain to rise up 
early and sit up late, simply to quaff the wine, 
sparkling though it is, of such ephemeral joys? 
What a mad game is such a life ! How poor, after 
all, the ambition to shine ; to shine for self glory, 
to shine for the applause of the vulgar crowd ; 
then out, brief candle, out ; and darkness and 
shame ! 



ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 285 

No wonder that a man who had tasted the 
sweets of gratified ambition, of wealth, and hon- 
ors and power, could, in his bitter downfall, bid 
his bosom friend to fling away ambition. The 
ambition which finds its all, in self-exaltation is a 
curse. 

Again, I remark : Love of wife and children 
has been the incentive with many men to do well 
in life. This love has inspired to tireless energy 
in seeking its object. 

Is it not the dream of love that has aroused a 
young man to quit a life of selfish ease, indiffer- 
ence, or low pleasure, and call on all the nobler 
forces of his being to put forth their energies, in 
order to acquit himself well in the eyes of his be- 
loved, and make himself worthy of her ? 

It was the love of a pure and beautiful maiden 
that caused a young man, whose drinking habits 
had ruined his prospects, his character, and his life, 
to make a man of himself. While lying on the 
side-walk, asleep in drunken stupor, with his face 
exposed to the burning rays of the sun, she, who 
had once promised to be his bride, ere the demon 
of drink had proved stronger than the claims of 



286 ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 

manhood and respectability, passing by, stooped 
and lay her lace handkerchief across his face to 
protect it from the scorching light ; he awoke to 
find it there ; surveying it in astonishment, he 
found her name upon it. " What ! can it be she 
loves me still ? " he exclaimed. " God help me 
to be worthy of that love." And love won back 
for him manhood, honor, place, and a useful 
career. " Now abideth faith, hope and love ; but 
the greatest of these is love." 

Love of science, invention, discovery, has 
afforded motives for earnest toil in these wide 
fields. 

Devout workers have gained inspiration, not 
alone from favorite pursuits, but from the hope 
that their labors would accrue to the benefit of 
humanity. A Harvey, a Koch, a Jenner, a Col- 
umbus, an Edison have been cheered amid the 
hardships of continuous toil and experiment, in 
the expectation of being benefactors to their kind. 
Wealth alone has not been the goal of their efforts. 

Enthusiasm for humanity will quicken the 
pulse, as a young man goes into his life work. 
The broadest view of our race, as it stands in the 



ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 287 

light of God, will help the man who seeks great 
things for himself. Every man according to his 
capacities, and divine conferments, has responsi- 
bilities and duties to his fellows. No man liveth 
to himself; we are bound to each ojther. Inde- 
pendence is limited ; we depend on each other. 
Because society has made it possible for every 
man to work out a career, in sequestered study or 
the mart of toil amid the roaring wheels of traffic, 
every man owes humanity a duty for the boon so 
freely bestowed. The man whose only object is 
selfish aggrandizement, is the incarnation of base 
ingratitude. 

In this land, above all others, the citizen should 
recognize the value of his environment, and listen 
to the call for voluntary service in behalf of the 
nation. 

Enthusiasm for humanity will be enkindled, 
first of all by a high ideal of humanity, and in 
seeking the Godlike and divine in human nature, 
and in all history. He who recognizes this will 
shake himself free from the moral malady that 
paralyzes so many of our young men. The man 
whose ideas of his fellow men are lofty, will seek 



288 ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 

to be worthy of them, and to fit himself for noble 
service. The duty of being helpful to our day 
and generation, demands preparation. 

Noble deeds are not the result of chance or hap- 
pening. He who would do great things must seek 
to make himself worthy to do them. 

As well throw the Greek alphabet on the floor, 
and expect Homer's Iliad to spring up, as to ex- 
pect success by throwing one's talents to the 
winds. He who sows millet may look for millet ; 
wheat, may expect a harvest of wheat. He who 
sows the wind, may as confidently await the reap- 
ing of the whirlwind. 

President Thiers of France, was once accosted by 
a reporter, who complimented him on the readiness 
and finish of what he called his impromptu effort. 
The great statesman replied, " No statesman 
should speak on any great theme of State without 
careful reflection. The speeches you call impro- 
vised, why, for fifty years, I have been rising at 
five o'clock in the morning to make them." 

A sense of the profound worth of life will 
help a man in seeking great aims. God is 
in man, the hope of glory, hence his life 



ENTHUSIASM FOR HUMANITY. 289 

is divine and sacred. It is our place to nourish 
and develop its nobler faculties, strong in the 
faith that one day the brotherhood of man 
shall lift an unbroken litany of praise and joy 
around the great world. If God has loved us, 
ought not men to love Him, who gave His Son to 
be the Saviour of the world ? and, in imitation of 
that divine Saviour, love his fellow man ? 

Enthusiasm for humanity will quicken the no- 
blest aspirations, and keep brain, and heart, and 
hand steady in the real work of life. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



Think not to find this kingdom great, 

Upon some distant star ; 
Or in the pomps of royal state ; 

Or favored land afar, 
Where sunny skies bend low to kiss 

The foliage' s brilliant green, 
And souls of men are soothed by bliss 

In other climes unseen : 
Invisible to light of day, 

Within thy heart its sway. 

The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand ; 
repent ye, and believe the Gospel, 

Mark 1:15. 



XVI. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

Every day is a judgment day. Every day is 
critical of all coming days. Every day the King- 
dom of God is at hand, right at the very threshold 
of the soul. Here Christ stands and declares, 
u The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is 
at hand ; repent ye, and believe the Gospel." At 
the end of that old Hebrew dispensation, Jesus 
came to declare to the world God's nearness to 
man, His love for man. He did not speak of a 
new creation or a new order in the universe. 
God's attitude towards the race had not changed 
any. He was always love. The supernatural had 
always waited at the threshold of the soul of man, 
to inspire, to uplift, and to captivate the heart 
with its eternal truths. Jesus' mission was to 



294 TH 3 KINGDOM OF GOD. 

turn men's attention to the Kingdom of God that 
was always near. 

What the men of our age need is not new truths 
or the creation of new kingdoms for their recep- 
tive faculties, but new perceptions to see the old 
truths, new eyes to behold what has always been 
close at hand. 

This universe is God's Kingdom. He is its one 
centre. His law is the one force that rules every- 
where. All His creatures are the subjects of the 
Kingdom, and under its government. So justice 
for one is justice for all humanity. Truth for one 
is truth for all. 

As the problems of geometry were true before 
Euclid demonstrated them ; as they are true to-day 
for American and Chinese alike, so moral and spir- 
itual truth was the same before, as after Jesus ut- 
tered His doctrines, and it remains truth forever. 

The law of charity is universal, and declarative 
of the individual's place in that brotherhood of 
man which binds the race in the golden girdle of 
love. 

The law of renunciation, the central truth of the 
gospel, is the one spiral ascent on which loving 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 295 

souls may rise to heights of devotion and religious 
conquests. Whether we have eyes to see, and 
hearts to respond to these sublime realities or not, 
they remain true facts in God's universe. Whether 
we see it or ignore it, the Kingdom of God is 
here. It has established itself at our door. It 
waits to be recognized. The supernatural is in 
human life. It is the breath of steam and the 
pulse of fire to its activity. It is only by living in 
an atmosphere of the supernatural, and becoming 
energized by the supersensuous, that hope is 
kindled in the heart, and faith nerves the soul for 
life's heroic conquests. To feel God, and lean 
upon His strong arm, is half the battle to the man 
who would be pure, or great, or good, and achieve 
aught that shall bear the scrutiny of eternity. Let 
me ask you, do you not remember, in your relig- 
ious experience, when you began to realize the 
presence of God in your life ? iVwed by the su- 
pernatural, you yet believed, relied on it, and 
wrought in its power. I do not wonder that men 
go down amid the great temptations of life. Los- 
ing sight of this central fact, without moorings, 
they drift away and are lost. Look at the many 



296 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

whose consciences have been seared by the cor- 
ruptions of society, of politics, and even the 
church. 

Is it so astonishing that men should fail in in- 
tegrity, and come short in honor, when they drift 
apart from the Kingdom of God ? Or is it a mat- 
ter of surprise that such men distrust, with the 
bitterness of despair, humanity, and look with 
gloomy forebodings on the future ? Meeting a 
leading lawyer and politician in Boston, I went 
with him to enjoy the hospitality of his charming 
country seat. We chatted in the freedom of his 
home. " How is it with you," I said, u does the 
experience of years make you think the better of 
humanity?" " No," he replied, curtly, u men ap- 
pear meaner and meaner to me. The whole fabric 
of society is rotten. Society, politics and the 
Church are corrupt to the core." He had lost 
hold of the supernatural. He despaired of human- 
ity. 

Then from a deep knowledge of its secret work- 
ings, he rehearsed the low depths to which his 
party had stooped to pave the way to victory. 
"And what can our great religious teachers say 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 297 

about it ?" They reply in the words of the Book : 
" The Kingdom of God is at hand, repent ye, and 
believe the gospel. " What men truly need for 
individual purification and the reformation of so- 
ciety, is to believe the gospel, to trust it, and apply 
it, fearlessly, to all the problems of life. 

Again, I talked with a business man. He was 
in the grasp of the world. He told me of some 
questionable business methods that would have 
been frowned upon a quarter of a century ago. 

His was a gloomy outlook for humanity." But 
did not his opinions come from such a complete 
absorption in the world, that he failed to heed what 
Jesus says is the real salvation of the world? He 
lived in the shifting atmosphere of trade. He 
knew no other. An American merchant went 
down to a South American port. His business 
led him into a law suit. As in Latin speaking 
countries, the case was tried before a judge. 
Somebody told the merchant that if he wanted to 
win his case he must remember the judge. He 
felt he must win that case. He remembered the 
judge, and slipped five hundred dollars into his 
hand. His conscience was easy. It was the cus- 



298 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

torn of the land. He would win. He was over- 
whelmed with astonishment when he heard the 
case decided against him. Meeting the judge in 
a back street, he exclaimed, " Did I not give you 
five hundred dollars to decide in my favor ?" 
"■Yes," replied the virtuous judge, " but the other 
man gave me seven hundred and fifty dollars. " 
And he passed on. Could that merchant have any 
poorer opinion of humanity than he had of himself. 
We were on the beach, this summer, when a 
dense fog shut down on us. The fog-horn blew 
dismally. Not a sail could we see. Objects were 
lost a rod away. Suddenly some one exclaimed 
" Look!" The fog had lifted mysteriously, and 
silently the breath of heaven had dispelled it. 
There was the white, shining light-house, five 
miles down the coast, and there was the blue sky 
above and the blue sea below. What men need is 
to let the breath of heaven dispel the dreary fog 
of sin and corruption, the life of an imperfect and 
dwarfed humanity has evoked, that they may see 
the Kingdom of God in its height and depth. 
The man who thus feels the nearness of the super- 
natural to man's existence, does not flatter the 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 299 ' 

world with the tale of its goodness or greatness, 
but he believes in the regenerating power of 
the gospel, and is hopeful of ultimate victory. 
God speaks to man in manifold ways. His King- 
dom touches humanity on all sides. Many men- 
are willing to acknowledge God's presence in 
the physical world ; why not, then, in the religious 
life of man? The poet Bryant sings: 

"To him who, in the love of Nature holds 
Communion with her visible forms, 
She speaks a various language." 

What is that but limiting to nature what belongs 
to the Infinite ? He speaks a various language to 
the hearts of men. The chords of joy or sorrow, 
when touched by Him, respond with undying mel- 
ody. 

To-day, in the heart of Ohio, the music of the 
sea beating upon the shore, is yet sounding in my 
ears.. The carols of the birds in those forests that 
fringe the coast, the seolian melody of the wind in 
those leafy bowers, lie like bright poems on the 
pages of memory, or live in the corridors of the 
brain. The one thought that comes to me, go 
where I may, amid the beauties of sea or land, is 



.300 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

the presence of God in His works. This beaute- 
ous frame of things is God's thought, telling of 
His creative power, speaking of his protecting and 
sustaining providence. Ought not men to be glad 
to acknowledge the primal cause of all this won- 
drous being? With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 
gazing upon the stupendous glories of the Alps, 
we may cry out — 

" Who made you glorious as the gates of Heaven, 
Beneath the keen, full moon ? Who bade the sun 
Clothe you in rainbows ? Who, with living flowers 
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet ? 
God ! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, 
Answer ; and let the ice plains echo God !" 

Shall we not see Him everywhere ? 

God made, we say, the sombre forest and the 
laughing daisy. Glad to see Him in nature, shall 
we not behold Him in man's existence ? Why do 
we put Him apart from our religious life ? He is 
in it. For us His Kingdom is in the world. 
Every day brings it to us. Lo ! the kingdom of 
God is here. It is not a kingdom to be establish- 
ed. It is already here. Where we are it goes, 
waiting to be found out by us. 

But, you say, " How is this kingdom to come to 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 3OI 

me ? " Many a man who has felt himself empty and 
hungry spiritually has sought it in the wrong 
place, and in the wrong way. Naaman expected 
God to come to him in a fashion commensurate 
with his human pride. He was looking in the 
wrong place. The Kingdom of God, Christ de- 
clares, cometh not with observation. The solemn 
truths of history, reiterate the Master's words. It 
cannot be said that the Kingdom of Mohammed 
came without observation. It arose in fanaticism 
and ran its way through fire and blood. Who in 
the world observed when Jesus came ? Some shep- 
herds — a wise man or two. How did the king- 
dom he preached progress ? Who saw it appear in 
Antioch? Did the augurs herald it at Rome? 
Here was a soldier who found it. The Kingdom 
of God was in the army. A man in the palace saw 
it. The Kingdom of God was in Rome. So it 
has gone on marching down the centuries. Epochs 
illustrate the Redeemer's words, " It cometh not 
with observation." 

It is in the heart of man, a silent, and invisible 
force. He who has it, knows it. There is no mis- 
taking its presence. 



302 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

So it comes to-day. It is here now. You may 
find it now. Find Christ. Let him dwell in you. 
You are in that kingdom. Jesus is here this 
morning. He speaks to you. 

I think that somewhere or somehow that king- 
dom appears to every man. Christ comes to fill 
the void, to stop the ache of hearts. He comes to 
transfigure you with His infinite glory. The 
draught of repentence may be bitter, but the joy 
of salvation shall be sweet. If you do not enter 
this kingdom, may not the thought that you have 
once seen the Christ and not believed in Him be 
the most hateful memory of your existence? You 
may quench the regret of many a lost opportunity. 
The sting of loss of health, riches, intellectual at- 
tainments, worldly ambition, you may out-grow. 
How shall the undying soul lose its regrets that it 
once saw the Christ, but believed Him not ? 

Once lifted into the Kingdom of God, the sor- 
rows and many of the contradictions of life, that 
seem enigmas, shrouded w r ith vaporous darkness, 
will reflect the glory of the Lord our God. 

There is a mountain in China from which, I have 
read, may be observed a singular phenomena. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 303 

Ascending nearly a mile high, and going to its 
precipitous face, one may behold in the midst of 
the dark abyss below a bright sunlit disk of light, 
around which is a beautiful halo of the colors of 
the rainbow. 

The natives call it the glory of Buddah, attrib- 
uting it to the reflection from his crown of light. 
The mountain is regarded as a sacred mount. Ex- 
plained by Prof. Tyndall, the appearance is simi- 
lar to the rainbow. The sun-rays are reflected on 
the mists of the valley. But, to see it, you must 
be above the mists. So to behold the glory of the 
divine love illuminate the sorrow of self and the 
world, a man must be exalted in the Kingdom of 
God above the mists and damps of this sinful 
world. 

Not only is the Redeemer's call to repentance, 
but it is also to steadfast belief. He demands a 
positive belief. Is He right? Is the Gospel eternal 
truth ? Are you a sinner ? Then be guided by 
Him, through trial and night and tempest. Be- 
lieve the Gospel. He declares to you the king- 
dom. Trust Him. He will lead you into its safe 
repose. 



304 THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 

Far from land, anchored above a shoal, you are 
intensely occupied in beguiling the fish of the sea 
to your hook. The skipper scents the storm from 
afar. But the summer sea is calm. You laugh at 
his fears ; your sport beguiles you. He urges you 
to up anchor and away to the harbor. Yet you 
linger in false security. And now the storm 
bursts in its fury. The waves run high, the wind 
howls through the rigging ; death stares you in 
the face. The white-winged sea gulls soar above 
the storm and find a safe harborage. But the 
storm mocks you with its fury ; whom have you 
to blame for your peril but yourself? You refused 
to believe the skipper and be guided by him. Glid- 
ing over this sea of life, or anchored in eager pur- 
suit here or there, Christ tells you this morning to 
seek safety in the Kingdom of God. 

Will you refuse to believe and obey Him ? 

The Kingdom of God is at hand now. To every 
age it is near. You have felt near it many times. 
You have almost believed the Gospel. Yet you 
linger. 

You have heard that the Kingdom of God would 
come to you at the day of your death. 



THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 305 

" But that is far away, " you say. Is it? 

At Nantucket one summer, a preacher rode by 
the old burial place. Silent, and gray, and dim 
with age it looked. By his side was a laughing 
girl. " Only very old people, I suppose, are 
there," she said. " Only very old people," he 
mused, " I saw there a headstone for a little babe, 
a boy of six and a girl of ten." 

" Only very old people ! " None have immunity 
from thee, O, Death ! " Watch, therefore, for ye 
know neither the day nor the hour wherein the 
Son of Man cometh." 

When He comes, the Kingdom of God comes. 

How long will you wait to enter it ? Listen ! 
Be wise ! Now is your great opportunity. Invis- 
ible gates swing open. Angels whisper to you. 
A treasure-trove, richer than the imagination 
ever dreamed, awaits you. 

The King summons you. " The Kingdom of 
God is at hand ; repent ye, and believe the Gos- 
pel." 



LEADERSHIP. 



Bring down the stars, whose golden light, 
Glows near the Alpine summits white, 
And yoke them to the thoughts divine, 
Which throb in human speech, and shine 
In scholars court and Council Hall, 
That gauge the World' ] s great tidal fall. 

If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch. 

Matt, xvn^. 



XVII. 



LEADERSHIP. 

Says an American thinker : " The ordinary 
man in law, medicine or theology, comes only un- 
to the knowledge of the letter that killeth. But 
thoughtful men do not give stones for bread, nor 
have they ever done so." 

Christ came to set right the thinking of the 
world, that had all gone wrong. The leaders of 
society had been blind to the spirit of truth, and 
the knowledge of right. If the leaders in politics, 
society and religion are blind, the ditch only is be- 
fore us. Christ upbraided the Disciples for follow- 
ing the Jewish leaders and showing lack of under- 
standing. 

In all ages the progress of the race has been 
hindered by the blind prejudices of society. 



310 LEADERSHIP. 

Francis Bacon said long ago " the principal hin- 
drances to scientific progress, or religious advance- 
ment, are the prejudices of men." These are the 
idols men have worshipped. 

It is not sufficient for a man to be devout and 
religious, to reverence the Infinite and be a 
good merchant, lawyer, physician. He must rec- 
ognize the duties and obligations he owes to his 
fellow men. Sociology lays its imperative upon 
him, beginning with self, and reaching out to 
home, state, church and the world. 

The command, u Love one another "; and 
"Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the 
law of the cross of Christ," is broader than speak- 
ing in prayer-meeting, giving dole to the needy, or 
watching by the sick bed. 

Men of thought must seize the loftiest idea of 
manhood, and reach out in self-denial, for the bet- 
terment of the world. An affection for the high- 
est manliness and its duties, will lead to worth, 
greatness and enduring deeds. Men of such type 
will draw their fellows upward, towards the largest 
ideals of living. 

The vast expenditure of power by the sun of 



LEADERSHIP. 31 1 

a 

our system is one of the fascinating mysteries of 
science. The mechanical energy that the sun 
flings out into space, manifesting itself in what 
we call gravitation, is coming to be regarded, not 
as a drawing, but a pushing, impelling, driving 
force. But the soul of man is not driveii, but 
drawn. 

When God deals with matter, He drives it by 
his law, compelling swift obedience. When Christ 
deals with the souls of men he draws them, from 
above, lifting them into the empyrean of His own 
matchless character. 

As salvation is from above, so the leadership 
that the world needs is that from above. It is 
consecrated scholarship that represents the high- 
est moral transforming power in society to-day. 
There is a spirit abroad that puts the personal 
license, and the do-as-I-please doctrine, in place ol 
unflinching loyalty to Christ and His doctrine. 
But experience has proven that it is the heart 
of Jesus, efflorescent in human life that surrounds 
all things with new attributes, and comes as a 
benediction to the lowliest and most common 
place. 



312 LEADERSHIP. 

The aims and purposes of our higher education, 
are not bounded either by the classics, the cruci- 
ble and test-tube, or the telescope. The scholar, 
the product of these institutions, has been charac- 
terized as cowardly, and indifferent to public wel- 
fare. 

President Gilman, of John Hopkins University, 
asks of an educational institution : " Is it a place 
of sound education? Are the youth trained with- 
in its walls, lovers of truth ? are they learned ? are 
they trustworthy ? And to sum up all questions 
in one, Is it a place for the development of man- 
liness." 

In the great pyramid of Egypt is a smooth shaft 
cut slopingly through the solid stone, and pointing 
like a telescope to the heavens, near the pole. 
When it was built the ancient priest astronomer 
thought it pointed to a fixed star in a changeless 
sky. To-night the eye that gazes through it looks 
at empty space. The star is gone, even as Rame- 
ses and his dynasty, with the culture and glory 
of Nile Land, have disappeared. Those seemingly 
changeless heavens are known to be moving now. 
How vast the gap between those earlier men of 



LEADERSHIP. 313 

science and the modern investigator, who with 
millions on millions of mutations between him 
and his elder brother, sits patiently to read the 
variations of the stars, and even the elements 
composing them, not through the medium of the 
eye, elongated even by the grandest magnifiers, 
but as they are displayed, with unerring accuracy, 
on the delicate photographic plate. 

But how much vaster is the gulf, between the 
religious notions, of the dweller beneath the shad- 
ow of the great pyramid — his idea of the Creator 
of those worlds and man's relation to Him, and to 
his fellows, and the sentiments that sway the hu- 
man mind and heart to-day. 

Nearly nineteen hundred years ago, in Bethle- 
hem, a star greeted the vision of the heavenly 
watchers, whose shining has been growing clearer 
and clearer with each succeeding generation. To- 
night, in the heart of this vast Republic — that had 
no existence, even in the dreams of men, when He 
was born, we come to bend the knee before this 
exalted Redeemer of the race, and adore Him as 
the author of our life and liberties. To his ap- 
pearing once in time we reverently trace the pos- 



314 LEADERSHIP. 

sibilities of a Christian brotherhood, a Christian 
scholarship, and a race redeemed as the freemen 
of the Lord. 

If we are His, we ask ourselves, how can we 
more perfectly receive His light, obey His teach- 
ings, enter into His life, and lead more and more 
of our race to trust Him for personal salvation, 
and apply loyally His teachings to all the opening 
problems in the evolution of society. 

Stars may come and stars may go ; but bright- 
est of all the heavenly luminaries, His star is 
shining on. 

The evolution of society from the condition of 
those dwellers beneath the shadow of the pyra- 
mids, to the magnificent bloom of the nineteenth 
century civilization, is a mighty stride. Slow 
growths and long periods, and many struggles 
alone have sufficed to produce such splendid re- 
sults. 

The law of growth in nations and individuals is 
the same. The poet and artist are born, not made 
with human machinery. For sculpture, it is not 
enough to know anatomy or wield the chisel. The 
artist must learn to breathe soul into the stone. He 



LEADERSHIP. 315 

" Must submit to a law which it is painful to obeyy 
that he may bestow a delight which it is gracious 
to bestow." 

" It's a big price you ask for that work," says 
the Yankee to the French artist, " you can paint 
that picture in three days." " True," was the re- 
ply, u but it took me fit teen years to learn how 
to do it in three days." 

It may take a generation for a wiser thinker to 
develop an idea and whisper it to the heart of the 
nation, ere the people will hear, and kindle into 
thought and action. 

When the heart of the nation catches fire at it, 
the demagogue and stump orator are glib enough 
in its enunciation. 

If you want to serve the world, young men, you 
must be Christians yourselves. There must be 
something behind the creed you utter, or your pro- 
fessions of religion or morality. It must be Chris- 
tian manhood. The scholar — above all men — 
should cultivate a habit of mind with steadfast 
reference to equity founded in nature, purity and 
public advantage. For he is set for the rising or 
falling of many. The man must be greater than 



316 LEADERSHIP. 

his profession or his talents. " The purest liter- 
ary talent, ■' says Emerson, " appears at one time 
great and at another time small, but character is 
of a stella and uudiminishable greatness. " This 
it was that made Lord Chatham, as he stood at 
the head of the English nation organizing her vic- 
tories on sea and land, and told their story to the 
British Parliament, glow with the form of Brit- 
ain's self ; the roar of British guns, and the shout 
of British victory reverberated in his eloquence, 
and men felt there was something grander about 
the man than anything he said. It was character. 
The Christian scholar will lay his first claim to 
leadership in his Christ-like character. 

Once brute force was the measure of manhood. 
The query was, which was greater, Hercules or 
Ajax? Achilles or Hector? 

How silly the question known to have been 
debated in our school days : " Who was the great- 
er man, Alexander or Napoleon ? " — the butcher, 
Alexander, or the butcher, Napoleon? The Chris- 
tian, whose enthusiasm is kindled at the manhood 
of Jesus, does not judge of Napoleon from the 
centre of that military glory that enshrines him at 



LEADERSHIP. 317 

Jena or Austerlitz ; but asks, what was he as a 
man at home ? how did he treat Josephine ? what 
love had he for men ? how did he appear in adver- 
sity ? on what terms treat with death in lonely St. 
Helena ? The notion that genius on its manhood 
side is not to be judged by the code of morals that 
applies to other men — is exploded. 

This age, because it is more Christian than any 
other, is conspicuous for making a great deal of 
the finer sensitive qualities of the heart. The 
strong virtues are the meek and patient virtues. 
The canon of criticism is the renaissance of 
the old canon of the cross. 

Yet in our estimate of that which makes up the 
worth and greatness of human life, are we not in- 
clined to give too large a space to mere hard in- 
tellectual qualities ? 

Macaulay throws a just shadow on the great in- 
tellectual life of Lord Bacon, when his pen draws 
a picture of the meanness of his character. Car- 
lyle drags the mantle of the hero from Cromwell 
as he displays to the world his consummate sel- 
fishness. And the rapier like polish of Frederick the 
Great's intellect is dimned by his lack of moral 



318 LEADERSHIP. 

worth. Pugilism, intellectual or physical, is con- 
temptible in the light of the law of Christ. The last 
canon of greatness is written in the volume of 
love and gentleness. The victory of Jesus, in Pi- 
late's judgment hall, declares the triumph of the 
gentle face over the brutal one. " The bravest 
are the tenderest ; the loving are the daring." 

It is true, that, as a class, the scholars, the think- 
ers, the men of books, have been much maligned. 
Those who have taken advantage of the oppor- 
tunities that society affords, for real growth and 
culture, and who are thereby qualified to speak, 
have too often been shoved aside by time-servers, 
and men of low expedients, in the attempts at 
reformation of abuse, or ancient wrong. It is also, 
too true, alas ! in the corruption of politics, the 
truly wise and noble have stepped aside ; the best 
are silent now. Mammon worship pervades all 
public service. The scholar has selfishly retired, 
not to sm irch himself in the cesspools of political 
service. Yet here is his place. There is a real 
glory in even being the anvil on which, in the 
white heat of conflict, great issues are forged. Our 
education is defective that does not recognize 



LEADERSHIP. 319 

the imperative of religion to exalt manliness. 
So the Christian leadership, towards which I 
point, is not to come simply from intellectual grasp 
but from greatness of soul. It is evolved from 
positive faith in the personal Christ, and a sound 
gospel morality, as all sufficient for the world's 
need. 

It is the men who lift the idea of humanitv, 
glorified through the incarnation, before the world, 
who are gladly accepted as leaders, in the long 
run. Though many such men were the heretics 
of yesterday, they are the heroes of to-day. 
Of Michael Angelo it has been written, " He 
was the brother and friend of all that acknowl- 
edge the beauty that beams in universal nature, 
and who seek by nature and self-denial to ap- 
proach its source in perfect goodness. ,? And 
our great countryman, who has himself been 
limned as the " Flower of the heart of Mil- 
ton/' could declare of his prototype : " It is the 
prerogative of this great man to stand at this hour 
foremost in literary history in the power to in- 
spire." Men who have had the spirit of Christ, have 
had this power to inspire. Whether a Milton or 



320 LEADERSHIP. 

a Gladstone, a Luther or a Knox, they have made 
their fellows think better of the race, and its pos- 
sibilities for good. " Better than any other he has 
raised the idea of man in the minds of his con- 
temporaries and of posterity," writes Emerson of 
John Milton. 

How did these truly great men do this ? By 
first of all reaching out to the Redeemer with pas- 
sionate love and reflecting Him in the inner life. 
First, liberty of being, of character, and then they 
were led by the Master, whom they adored, int© 
the liberty of service. And in divine service will 
our efforts after Christ-like character find their 
glory and consummation. 

If the Christian's citizenship is in Heaven, and 
there are duties and responsibilities that rest upon 
him towards the kingdom of God upon earth as 
well, for the regeneration and reformation of so- 
ciety, he must recognize the obligations he owes 
to, his fellow man. Sociology lays its imperative 
upon him. The Christian scholar is called upon 
in these times to stand firm under the shadow of the 
Cross with the uplifted Bible. Let him declare the 
dignity of manhood. To be venal is no venial of- 



LEADERSHIP. 321 

fence. It often requires the grandest heroism to 
simply stand firmly and do one's duty. There is 
something sublime in the heart that receives the 
blows of the hammer in the white heat of tempta- 
tion. For often, it is beneath the furnace blast, we 
wait the power of transformation. No price that 
can be weighed in gold can repay a man for part- 
ing with one ounce of his manhood. For man- 
hood means moral purity, boldness, dignity and 
bravery. 

Experience teaches that the men who in these 
latter ages have wrought marvels for humanity, 
have been the scholars and the thinkers walking 
under the sceptre of the law of Christ. They have 
been men and not woodchucks, and nature has 
served them, whether on mud floor or chair of 
ivory, and their fellows have listened because they 
have brought the ideal Christ to actual life. " This 
is natural, this is for us here and now," they said. 
Losing self in the vision par-excellent, they have 
been kindled into beacon lights, and in the shin- 
ing their brothers have gratefully dwelt. Con- 
stantly in our myriad of newspapers and maga- 
zines the educated man, the scholar and thinker, is 



322 LEADERSHIP. 

exhorted to do his duty to the state and society, and 
to recognize the call to self-denial and consecrat- 
ed service for the good of the Republic. I believe 
the men of religious and moral principles are do- 
ing this. In spite of all the demagogism, quack- 
ery and corruption in the land, take from educa- 
tion the force that the conscientious, moral, think- 
ing men are exerting in leadership, and you sap 
the mainspring of moral and progressive action. 
It is the silent, but potential leadership, of 
the educated that is saving this land. It 
was Theodore Parker who lamented just be- 
fore the wild storm of our civil war : "If our edu- 
cated men had done their duty, we should not 
now be in the terrible condition that we deplore. " 
Yet I know that it is the American thinker and 
scholar, whose white plume of Navarre has been 
in the van of every struggle for human rights ; and 
whose eloquence, with more than Amphion music, 
has burned away the barriers to human progress, 
and smiting the Theban walls of American slavery 
leveled them to the ground. 

In this country, let us notice, that it has been true, 
that she owes her institutions, her safety, her pres- 



LEADERSHIP. 323 

•ent and prospective progress to her scholars and 
thinking men. Their patience, toils and sacri- 
fices have availed largely to make her what she is. 
It was once said that New England led the Union. 
What then led New England ? may be pertinently 
asked. Her scholars and thinkers lighted the 
morning guns of the revolution, whose echoes 
were destined to reverberate round the world. In 
the revolutionary period educated men led the 
way, and prepared the thought of the people, in 
pulpit, on platform, and in press. 

In the travail of the confederation from chaos 
and anarchy towards constitutional union and 
unity, the good genius of her educated men pre- 
vailed. " In that goodliest fellowship of law- 
givers of which the world holds record, " that 
framed for us the constitution, that has done so 
much to direct the ship of state through many a 
troubled sea, out of fifty-three noble men, thirty- 
three were college graduates. 

Ten years before our civil war George Bancroft, 
the historian and patriot, was walking on the 
rocks at Newport with one of our younger schol- 
ars, who was beginning even then to reflect in 



324 LEADERSHIP. 

himself the starry radiance of a Sir Philip Sydney > 
and with the loity courage of his young manhood, 
smite the lethargy, indifference and mammon wor- 
ship of his fellows. Said the scholar to the his- 
torian : " Where do you propose to end your his- 
tory ? n Waving his hand over the sea, the his- 
torian replied : " If I were painting a picture of 
this ocean, I would stop with the horizon, This 
nation is but an experiment, I shall stop with the 
adoption of the Constitution. n 

Since then, this nation, that survived the strug- 
gle of its birth, has arisen from the ordeal of in- 
ternecine peril, and the seismic shocks of civil 
war, recreated, to proclaim its organic unity. 
This nation is one to-day. But because it has 
outridden so many storms, it is not safe to assume 
that its perpetuity is now assured. There are 
perils yet abroad. The insidious seeds of political 
and social disaster lurk in our very structural life. 
Never in any period of our national history was 
there more demand for lofty patriotism, and the 
vigorous strength of Christian manhood, smiting 
the lairs of the hydra-headed monsters lurking at 
our gates. Never were the opportunities of young 



LEADERSHIP. 325 

manhood greater than to-day, to work for the 
souls of men at home and abroad, and for the ref- 
ormation and purification of our land, to make this, 
in deed and in truth, Immanuel's land. The fires 
of unselfish devotion to country, must be kindled 
at the altars of worship. For us to love our coun- 
try, our country ought to look lovely in our eyes. 
There are perils abroad, destructive to patriotism, 
and a standing menace to the foundations of our 
government. 

To the thoughtful Christian mind how profound 
the perils arising from mammon worship and the 
haste to be rich ; the laxity of our naturalization 
and election laws ; the tendency in certain quarters 
to eliminate all ideas of God, and the ethics of 
Jesus from our political, social and educa- 
tional life ; and the mighty influx of those who 
have no sympathy with our moral purposes or insti- 
tutions. It is true that in no age has the brotherhood 
of man been more emphatically realized than now. 
" Our age is more democratic than other ages," 
says a recent writer, " because it is more Chris- 
tian. " What does Christian mean to the 
student of social science ? It means the 



320 LEADERSHIP. 

brotherhood of man ; the Fatherhood of God. 

Surely the Church of Christ has a voice amid 
these far-reaching questions. The Christian 
scholar dare not be silent. A great theo- 
logian is reported as saying: " The Church,, 
as such, is a spiritual company seeking its 
own edification in spiritual things. " But there 
are problems here that rise to the dignity of tre- 
mendous moral issues. It is false to say that the 
Church is simply seeking its own edification in 
spiritual things. It has a divine Word committed 
to it, which is capable of application to all the 
problems of human life. Its mission is to expound 
and apply this word. Men have treated the ethics 
of Jesus as they are wont to treat an unsafe bow, 
or thin ice. Men have not trusted the Gospel as 
it is worthy of being trusted. They have been 
afraid to pull the arrow to the head, lest the bow 
should snap, or trust themselves on the ice, lest it 
should crack. 

Christian leadership is the power of kindling 
sympathy and trust, so that men will eagerly fol- 
low where the Gospel leads. It is the genius of 
molding the lips of the stony Memnon of public 



LEADERSHIP. 327 

opinion, so that the first sunbeam of opportunity 
will smite them into music. 

Never was America more plastic to good influ- 
ences than now. In the old fairy tale, the prin- 
cess lies in the enchanted castle, where the magic 
spell of the wizard has caused profound sleep to 
fall on maid, and servant, and sentinel. The mist 
that shroud keep and portal, terrace and battle- 
ment no mortal eye can pierce until, the young 
and stately knight, decreed by fate to break the 
spell and wed the fair princess, shall appear at the 
gate. Now the clarion note of the young knight's 
bugle sounds over hill and vale, He is beating 
for entrance at the portal. The spell of the en- 
chantment is dissolved. With alacrity the inmates 
of the lordly structure spring up, in the fair shin- 
ing of the radiant morn, to welcome their deliv- 
ered and future master. 

So, to-day, in an enchanted castle, lulled by in- 
difference, smitten by the moral malady of the 
laissezfaire doctrine our countrymen sleep, but this 
castle of superstition, ignorance and evil custom 
shall open its gates to the persistent bugle note 
of young manhood, fused by the expulsive power 



328 LEADERSHIP. 

of moral ideas. Be not in yonr efforts at advance- 
ment, blind leaders of the blind, but with under- 
standing enlightened, by Him who came down to 
earth to lift humanity up to His glorious Cross, 
bear His light, and truth, and love onward to il- 
lumine the, as yet, unseen future, before which 
every false enchantment shall be dissolved. 



CHRISTIAN ENDEAVOR HYMN. 

O, Jesus, King, to whom we look, 

Thy love on Calvary, 
Reflected in our hearts inspires 

Fresh loyalty to Thee. 

Thy holy cross upborne we see, 
Through ages sounds its note ; 

O Lamb of God, we march where'er 
Thy blood-stained banners float. 

To Thee, O Christ, allegiance be, 

And to Thy truth divine; 
Each to the other now we cry, 

And lift Thy bright ensign. 

Dear Saviour, soon, the conflict o'er, 
We'll lay our trophies down 

At Thy blest feet ; and from Thy hand 
Receive the victor's crown. 



THE PANSY BOOKS. 

There are more than a hundred " Pansy Books," mostly by Pansy 

herself, a few by one or two helpers, a very few by others 

altogether. They constitute the very highest class 

of Sunday-school and family literature. 

There are substantial reasons for the great popularity of the tk Pansy 
Books," and foremost among these is their truth to nature and to life. 
The genuineness of the types of character which they portray is indeed 
remarkable; their heroes bring us face to face with every phase of home 
life, and present graphic and inspiring pictures of the actual struggles 
through which victorious souls must go. 

ALPHABETICAL LIST of the PANSY BOOKS. 

Each volume 12mo, $1.50. 

1 Aunt Hannah, Martha and John 20 Links in Rebecca's Life 

2 Chautauqua Girls at Home 21 Miss Dee Dunmore Bryant 

3 Christie's Christinas 22 Mrs. Solomon Smith Looking On 

4 Chnssy's Endeavor 23 Modern Exodus (A) 

5 Divers Women 24 Modern Prophets 

6 Echoing and Re-Echoing 25 Man of the House 

7 Eighty -Seven 26 New Graft on the Family Tree(A) 

8 Endless Chain (An) 27 One Commonplace Day 

9 Ester Ried 28 Pocket Measure (The) 

10 Ester Ried Yet Speaking 29 Profiles 

11 Four Girls at Chautauqua 30 Ruth Erskine's Crosses 

12 From Different Standpoints 31 Randolphs (The) 

13 Hall in the Grove (The) 32 Sevenfold Trouble (A) 

14 Household Puzzles 33 Sidney Martin's Christmas 

15 Interrupted 34 Spun from Fact 

16 Judge Burnham's Daughters 35 Those Boys 

17 Julia Ried 36 Three People 

18 King's Daughters (The) 37 Tip Lewis and His Lamp 

19 Little Fishers and Their Nets 38 Wise and Otherwise 

Each volume 12mo, $1.25. 

39 Cunning Workmen 42 Miss Priscilla Hunter 

40 Dr. Deane's Way 43 Mrs. Deane'sWay 

41 Grandpa's Daiiiugs 44 What She Said 

Each volume 12 mo, $1.00. 

45 At Home and Abroad 50 New Year's Tangles 

46 Bobby's Wolf and other stories 51 Next Things 

47 Five Friends 52 Pansy's Scrap Book 

48 In the Woods and Out 53 Some Young Heroines 

49 Mrs. Harry Harper's Awakening 54 Young Folks Worth Knowing 

Each volume 12 mo, 75 cents. 

55 Bernie's White Chicken 62 Monteagle 

56 Couldn't be Bought 63 Pansies 

57 Docia's Journal 64 Six Little Girls 

58 Getting Ahead 65 Stories from the Life of Jesus 

59 Helen Lester 66 That Boy Bob 

60 Jessie Wells 67 Two Boys 

61 Mary Burton Abroad 



D. Lothrop Company, Publishers, Boston 



MARGARET SYDNEY'S BOOKS 



Perhaps the strongest quality of Margaret Sydney's books, 
apart from their general helpfulness and suggestiveness. is the 
bright, sunny, hopeful spirit which fairly illuminates the pages. 
No matter in what position her characters may be placed, they 
have this reserve force, this brave, cheerful sunniness, than 
which nothing can be more contagious. There is very little 
preaching in her stories but they are themselves better than 
sermons; they are living precepts. 

AN ADIRONDACK CABIN. Quarto, illustrated, cloth, 

$2.25; boards $1.75. A summer idyl of travel and adventure. 
FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS AND HOW THEY GREW. 

12mo, illustrated, $1.50; 4to, boards, 25 cents. 
FIVE LITTLE PEPPERS MIDWAY. Sequel to "Five 

Little Peppers." 12'mo, illustrated, $1.50. The further his- 
tory of the famous ''Peppers." 
OUR TOWN. 12mo, illustrated, $1.25. A graphic Chris- 
tian Endeavor Story. 
THE LITTLE RED SHOP. 12mo, illustrated, $1.00. A 

story of boyish ambition and success. 
A NEW DEPARTURE FOR GIRLS. 12mo, illustrated, 

75 cents. An inspiring story for young women. 
THE PETTIBONE NAME. 12mo. $1.25. A story of New 

England home life. 
HOW TOM AND DOROTHY MADE AND KEPT A 

CHRISTIAN HOME. 12mo, illustrated, 75 cents. 
THE GOLDEN WEST AS SEEN BY THE RIDGWAY 

CLUB. 8vo, illustrated, cloth $2 25; boards $1.75. 
SO AS BY FIRE. 12mo, illustrated, $1.25. An unique 

temperance story. 
WHAT THE SEVEN DID, or the Doings of the Wadsworth 

Club. 8vo, illustrated, cloth, $2.25; boards, $1.75. 
HOW THEY WENT TO EUROPE. 12mo, illustrated, 75 

cents. A delightful travel story "on paper." 
HESTER, and other New England stories. 12mo, illustrated, 

$1.25 cents. Studies ot New England life and character. 
ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. 12mo, illustrated, 

$1.00. The story of a manly boy. 
POLLY AND THE CHILDREN. 8vo, illustrated, boards, 

50 cents. A charming book for the little folks. 
HALF YEAR AT BRONCKTON. 12mo, illustrated, $1.25. 

Schoolboy life, its temptations and victories. 

D. Lothrop Company, Publishers, Boston. 



THE LOTHROP MAGAZINES. 

Welcome in Sunday School Libraries everywhere, for their 
valuable information on important subjects, as well 
as their Christian atmosphere and spirit. 



WIDE AWAKE. 100 pages each month, beautifully illus- 
trated. The best magazine for the older young people and the 
family. $2.40 a year. Serials by popular writers, short stories, 
practical papers, sketches and poems, by the most famous 
authors, illustrated by favorite artists. The plan of Wide 
Awake to secure the most helpful and interesting reading for 
its subscribers makes each year's numbers a library in itself. 
lk To know it is a liberal education, to own it a permanent pleasure.''' — 
Herald and Presbyter. 

THE PANSY. Edited by Pansy, the most popular writer 
for young people. Illustrated Monthly for Boys and Girls. 
$100 a year. The Pansy is especially adapted to boys and 
girls of from eight to fifteen, that most critical period of a 
young person's life, when habits are being formed, tastes 
aroused, and the dominant powers of the growing nature may 
be either stimulated to true and healthful action or morbidly 
excited by sensational and pernicious reading. A serial by 
Pansy, besides shorter stories, a serial by Margaret Syd- 
ney, a Christian Endeavor Department for Young People, a 
Sunday Afternoon Department and Mission Talk. 

"There is not now. nor will there be, a better magazine of its kind 
ever published than The Pansy." — Zion's Herald. 

OUR LITTLE MEN AND WOMEN. For little beginners 
in reading. $1.00 a year. Bright stories of things little minds 
are eager to know about, pretty poems to learn, all in large 
type, on fine paper, beautifully illustrated. 

k 'The value of such a magazine in a family of young - people cannot be 
estimated in dollars and cents. It is a constant entertainer and educa- 
tor." — Christian Advocate. 

BABYL AND. Baby's delight and mother's relief. 50 cents a 
year. Full of gay jingles and sweet little stories and dainty 
pictures to divert and instruct the little ones of the nursery. 
Every child from one to six should have it. 

u Every mother who desires to instil a taste for the beautiful and 
the good in her babies should subscribe for this publication.'' 1 — Sunday 
Press, Albany. 



Sample Copies of all four, 1 5c; of any one, 5c. 
D. Lothrop Company, Publishers, Boston. 

Bound volumes of all these magazines are very desirable in 
Sunday School Libraries. 



Mrs. S. R. Graham Clark's Books. 

This author is full of earnestness, and gives herself to the Mas- 
ter's cause with singleness of heart and faithful devotion to 
the great principles of duty. Her stories appeal to all thought- 
ful natures, and are helpful in their quiet strength and sincerity 
of purpose. 
YENSIE WALTON. 12mo, illustrated, $1.50. 

ki It will be welcomed by all lovers of high-toned fiction, not 
only for the delicious fragrance of true, abiding principle which 
is breathed from every page, but for the continuous and increas- 
ing interest of the narrative." — St. Paul Dispatch. 
YENSIE WALTON'S WOMANHOOD. 12mo, iliustrated,$1.50. 

The development of character in the young girl as life ex- 
pands before her and duties widen, is told with, sympathetic 
power and earnestness. 
HERBERT GARDENELL'S CHILDREN. 12mo, $1.50. 

" Herbert Gardenell is a clergyman with five children — ot 
whom Yensie Walton is the mother — and their characters and 
home life are the subject of the story, which is well told, and 
conveys impressive lessons." — Lutheran Observer, Philadelphia. 
THE TRIPLE " E." 12mo, $1.50. 

The Triple " E " is the name playfully given by her friends 
to a girl of eighteen, whose three names begin with that letter, 
and who is left with a younger sister to make her way in the 
world after the death of her parents. 
TOM'S STREET. 12mo, $1.50. 

Shows the good that may be done in a neighborhood through 
the efforts of one strong, earnest, willing worker like Tom 
Young, the hero, 
ACHOR. l2mo, $1.50. 

A sequel to The Triple "E." It has the same characters and 
solves the mystery which there enveloped the heroine's life, 
who, now grown to womanhood, devotes herself to the reclama- 
tion of a depraved father. 
OUR STREET. 12mo, illustrated, $1.50. 

"Just such a story as would make a lasting impression upon 
the minds of young readers, and create in them a detestation of 
the various customs of society which lead to habits of intemper- 
ance." — Pittsburgh Ghristian Advocate. 
GO'S GOINGS. 12mo, $1.50. 

Into the community already familiar to us from previous 
stories, Mrs. Clark introduces a young girl of sweety ingenuous 
character, who is destined to work a great change in it. 

D. Lothrop Company, Publishers, Boston. 






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